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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • I’ve had some stink bugs too, and it seems like most of the means the internet recommends for dealing with them suck in some way (only some of them literally like what you resorted to).

    • Squashing is universally contraindicated.
    • Sucking them up with a vacuum can make your vacuum stink.
    • Putting a light on a bowl of soapy and/or vinegary water would work, but is kindof a messy pain to deal with.
    • Pesticides are generally dangerous to humans.
    • My preferred option – catch them gently and take them outside alive – runs the risk that they’ll just find their way inside again

    But I guess I find that last option the least offensive.

    There was one I dealt with differently, though. I dropped him into a spider web a spider had built over my kitchen sink. I like to think the spider was very appreciative.




  • My first thought was the vertical car’s chassis was mounted high and car behind had just rear ended it so hard it flipped up and in a very unlikely turn of events happened to tip up with just the right amount of force to balance rather than fall further over on top of the front car. But if that was the case, you’d expect the back car’s windshield would be shattered and I can’t tell for sure whether it is or not in that picture.



    • Circular financing where all the “AI” players are paying each other making it seem like they’re worth something when they’re not (kinda like circle-jerk-style wash trading in a way.)
    • The tech CEOs and government all know that AI’s failing miserably and the bailout is already happening. The government is just casting things that are a bailout as “not a bailout” to try to keep it under wraps. (The “Great Big Beautiful Bill” had measures in it specifically to bail out AI companies.) They’re also propagandaing us hoping the public will support (or at least tolerate) a much more blatant bailout in the near future.
    • CoreWeave is a former crypto company that pivoted into building data centers. Many of the other AI players are financially dependent on CoreWeave. Meanwhile CoreWeave is in gar-fucking-gantuine amounts of debt that they will never be able to pay back in a trillion years. It’s very possible CoreWeave could be the first major domino to fall.






  • Honestly, I’m starting to think in terms of what really would it look like to not use a (Firefox- or Webkit-based) browser any more.

    Aside from random one-off things I wouldn’t know I wanted to use until I wanted to use it, a few things I’d want to be able to use on my desktop Gentoo machine:

    • Discord (without installing the proprietary dedicated app, though I don’t currently give a fuck about video or audio – just chat)
    • Lemmy (I might literally write my own client if necessary, but I’m curious about Neon Modem)
    • YouTube (Minitube’s not terrible)
    • Wikipedia (Dillo would probably work ok for Wikipedia, though I’d definitely lose features like link hovering previous and such)
    • Twitch (No idea how to do that yet)
    • Gmail (Mutt, maybe? Though, honestly, I should quit Gmail and get another provider anyway.)
    • Various relatively-mainstream news sites and blogs (Dillo? RSS readers?)

    There are probably plenty of things I’m not thinking of. We’ll see if I ever do that or not.


  • Z is only depth if your camera happens to be at the origin facing in the positive Z direction, though. In most games, the camera almost never rotates except about a vertical axis, though, so Z as the vertical axis stays vertical always. (Exceptions being space sims, that leaning-around-the-corner maneuver in a lot of games where the camera tips, games with shifting gravity, etc.)

    I dunno. Z as up always felt more intuitive to me. It’s just another thing to argue about like Vim vs Emacs and tabs vs spaces, I guess.


  • I had a friend who wasn’t very technical who had some issue where he couldn’t boot into his OS (Windows) and bought a new computer, but wanted the files off the old computer. So he asked me for help. I remember bringing a Knoppix live CD (remember Knoppix?) And when I was there, I realized I had a severe lack of general networking equipment. (I didn’t have a switch, so I couldn’t plug both computers into the network so they could communicate with each other and the internet.)

    So I started up the old computer in Knoppix, plugged it into the network, and installed a bunch of networking packages like a DHCP server and such. And then I used the Ethernet cable to plug the two computers into each other, letting the Knoppix box give the new Windows machine its IP. And then I installed Putty on the Windows machine and used it to SCP the files from the old machine to the new one.

    The whole thing went way smoother than I’d have expected, never having attempted that before. But I felt like such a hacker that day. Lol.