ExtremeDullard

ExtremeDullard , 2 days ago

Literalicy? Ain’t nobody got time for dat.

ExtremeDullard , 5 days ago

So basically it’s UserLAnd with accelerated graphics instead of VNC.

ExtremeDullard , 12 days ago

Here’s my personal rule: any product / company heavy-handed enough to get past my strict ad filtering online, or advertises enough offline to get on my radar immediately goes into my never-buy list.

Example of that: NordVPN and Brilliant. They managed to bribe so many of the Youtubers I watch - who otherwise produce good, honest content - into shilling their shit that they will never get a dime from me. They might have if they hadn’t invaded so much of Youtube, but now they won’t.

ExtremeDullard , 12 days ago (edited 12 days ago)

I gave $20 to the friendly wino who lives in the dumpster down my street. He’s reported a income growth of 1000% for today.

ExtremeDullard , 12 days ago

The camera does not take influencer quality photos

That’s actually a selling feature.

ExtremeDullard , 12 days ago

I rock a Fairphone4 running CalyxOS. Apart from the hardware switches on the Purism phone, I don’t quite see what I’m missing out on privacy-wise.

ExtremeDullard , 16 days ago

Wow… If even Best Buy figured out those repair programs are designed to appease the regulators who ask for the right to repair but never actually be used, it should tell you how unappealing it is.s

ExtremeDullard , 16 days ago

It’s time to stop thinking phones are anything but commodity hardware with variable degrees of shittiness. There are no such things as premium phones, just premium prices.

ExtremeDullard , 16 days ago

Totally agree! I can’t wait to put that granite-cased phone with wood-backed PCBs in my pocket.

ExtremeDullard , 16 days ago

What’s privacy-focused ChatGPT? Is it like diet butter?

Hint: if it doesn’t run on your machine, it’s collecting monetizable data.

ExtremeDullard , 16 days ago

Do you know how many times some troll has posted about “rm -fr /” on Reddit and other shitty forums, which then gets gobbled up and laundered by LLMs?

Ironically, that now includes you 🙂

ExtremeDullard , 23 days ago

Install Linux in a VirtualBox virtual machine to try it out. No change to your existing Windows system is needed.

Better: install it in a virtual machine on a second hard drive: if you like it and you’re ready to switch, switch to booting the real Linux hard-drive and turn the Windows hard drive into the virtual machine, to use within Linux when you need it.

If you switch to Linux, this will happen:

• It’s gonna be tough: it’s a different system, you’re not used to it. Like everything else, it’s hard to change and get used to new things. So realistically expect some learning curve and some pain. It’s normal.
• If you give it an honest shot but you decide Linux is not for you, you’ll switch back to Windows. You’ll be back to your old normal, but you’ll start to notice how infuriating and spirit-crushing it is a lot more, having been exposed to a non-insane, user-centric OS for a while. And then you’ll be that much sadder in Windows and you’ll wish you had the best of both OSes - which you can’t.

Just be aware than exposure to a non-Windows OS will probably make you hate Windows more and make your life in Windows ever slightly more miserable, even if you don’t stick to the non-Windows OS.

ExtremeDullard , 28 days ago

They found microplastics in the testicles of EVERY human and yet I didn’t feel a thing when they tested me?

ExtremeDullard , 1 month ago

My Nokia 3210 definitely was louder. But then I didn’t have a hearing aid yet back then.

ExtremeDullard , 1 month ago

Maybe the restaurant is infested with investment bankers for whom life is indeed to short. Maybe the sign is a secret handshake to tell other investors they’re welcome in this joint.

ExtremeDullard , 1 month ago

I’ll tell you something else that will bankrupt the healthcare system: obesity.

Here’s an easy solution: send the bill to those who caused the obesity epidemic and the need for expensive weight loss drugs in the first place: the agro industry. Slap a moderate tax on any heavily processed food (that is, the vast majority of the food sold in the US) and you’ll fund the weight loss drug free for everyone ten times over.

ExtremeDullard , 1 month ago

Is your beef that the review is fake or that it’s poorly written?

Because everybody knows ALL reviews on Amazon are fake. If that’s what you find depressing, I guess you’ve been living under a rock for the past 10 years. It’s nothing new…

As for the low quality of the fake review, fear not: AI will soon make all fake reviews literary works of art. You’ll soon be able to spend countless hours on Amazon enjoying high-quality machine-written reviews 🙂

ExtremeDullard OP , 1 month ago

It’s not just soda bottles here, it’s milk bottles, cream, fruit concentrates… Anything in any kind of plastic container with a screw-on cap.

Actually the soda bottles are the least egregious examples. The milk bottles are terrible: you’re 100% guaranteed to spill milk if you don’t detach the cap.

ExtremeDullard OP , 1 month ago

The only problem with that theory is, they didn’t even open my box. I know that because the box still had the tape I closed it shut with. So they couldn’t know I had replaced the cord.

Besides, it wasn’t a shitty splice: I actually opened it and replaced the whole cord. You could never tell it wasn’t the original thing.

ExtremeDullard OP , 1 month ago

Plus, they very likely can’t sell electrical equipment that has had its cord chopped up and repaired

I did it proper. You couldn’t tell the cord had been replaced. For the rest, yeah I know what you mean. That doesn’t mean it’s not crazy that the Red Cross should refuse free shit. My Dad lived through the war and the food restrictions, and let me tell you, he would have been outraged.

Next time, find a friend with small feet who would like to take it off your hands.

The funny thing is, I’m a clear foot taller than my wife, but my own feet have been shortened surgically a few years ago and are now shorter than hers, and I fit inside the machine just fine. But I didn’t want the machine because I hate foot massages 🙂

ExtremeDullard OP , 1 month ago

With a scalpel and a bone saw - at least that’s what the surgeon said - and because sometimes people are born with issues that need fixing later in life.

ExtremeDullard OP , 1 month ago

Thanks!

ExtremeDullard , 1 month ago

The less Google can figure out who you are accurately, the longer the ReCAPTCHAs get. For instance, if you run Librewolf with Resist FingerPrinting, you’re going to eat a metric shit-ton of buses, stairs, bicycles and fire hydrants.

Captchas are maddening, they’re forced labor and there’s a special place in hell for whoever invented them, deploy then and maintain them. However, you should take comfort in the fact that if you have a really hard time getting past a particularly stubborn ReCAPTCHA, it means Google has a harder time tracking you.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

We have zero insight into the longevity of flash memory because it doesn’t matter: whatever it is, it’s a lot longer than the phone’s planned obscolescence.

That’s why you’ve never heard anybody complain about their saved data getting corrupted: their device has long since hit the landfill before that happens.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago

If that was the only issue with Reddit…

I don’t know what it is, but people there seem to be turning nastier and nastier. Like for instance, I posted some technical question on an electronics subreddit earlier, and something in my post - not sure what - landed me a -15 score, and people replying that if I didn’t like it I could fuck off. All I said was that some component wasn’t placed in a terribly convenient location in the new design, and the people who posted angry and rude comments weren’t even the designers. I mean what the actual fuck…

It seems a lot of subreddits I used to enjoy participating in are now full of people in a really antagonistic mood, and I often hesitate to post anything there now because I know it has a 50% change of turning nasty. And so instead, whenever possible, I post in the equivalent Lemmy community because even though they have a hundred times fewer users, it’s a much less frustrating experience.

I come interact on Reddit or Lemmy to have a good time, not to pick up a fight and get insulted by passive-aggressive internet lusers with frayed nerves.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

The reverse happens on Lemmy too in some community. Like for example the fairly [email protected]: it’s a radical anti-capitalist, probably pro-communist and most assuredly pro-anarchist community, which is generally fine by me. But if you go in there to express a reasonable opinion that isn’t “burn all corporations” or “kill all capitalists” and expect to have a reasonable discussion, that’s just not gonna happen. You’ll just get modded down. It’s not so much a place to discuss anything than a big anti-capitalist circle jerk.

So you can find places where people are angry and nasty like on Reddit here, but usually you kind of know in which community you’ll find the anger. On Reddit, the anger is everywhere and for no reason, including on subbreddits that aren’t the least bit controversial. And even if you don’t criticize a product or diss a company or its products, most Redditors are ready to jump at you because… well, they seem to feel the need to be aggressive.

I’m fairly convinced the nature of the platform turns them like that: Reddit is subtly aggressive too and I’m convinced it rubs off on its users.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago

Lemmy is far from perfect, and I’m 100% certain it’s going to become completely terrible as soon as a critical mass of the morons currently haunting Reddit transition over. But for the moment, it’s refreshing, the signal/noise ratio is still high, and it doesn’t feel like you’re being exploited for your data and advertised to all the time.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I don’t know about that.

I’ve been hearing society is bad and getting worse from a variety of people since I was born in the height of the Cold War, and I’ve come to believe it’s only a perception. It’s no better or worse than it’s ever been: it’s just that as people get older and the standards of their youth change, they feel alienated by a world that is increasinbly not theirs anymore.

I’m old enough to be a grumpy old man but I keep reminding myself that this isn’t my world anymore either. And if I’m honest, I don’t see how the world of today is significantly worse than when I was a kid and we were all preparing for nuclear armageddon any minute now. And I always remind myself how my grandparents and my parents constantly told me to stop listening to “degenerate n*ger music” and quit wasting my time with those damn computer things and pursue more “manly” endeavors. I don’t want to become bitter like they were because I have no real reason to: the world of today really hasn’t done anything to me, it just feels weird.

However, I will say this: social media brings the worst out of people. It’s like reality TV of the 80’s and Usenet, but turbocharged. I think the utter social mediocrity that is social media contributes a lot to the perception that society is worse: it isn’t, it’s just that the worst of it is a lot more visible and more vocal.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Forgive me if I’m saying something stupid, as I know nothing about Pokemon. But two minutes of searching turns up this repo that apparently lets you edit save files and more.

Which raises the disturbing question: do people really pay to get data they could make themselves for free?

Although I could be missing something obvious and perhaps this man was selling something this project or others like it couldn’t generate. Like I said, I don’t know the first thing about Pokemon.

As for this guy being arrested for selling fake stuff, is it really dystopic? It’s no different than selling fake Rolex watches or fake signed sports memorabilia: you’re either deceiving customers if they don’t know what they’re buying from you, or you’re damaging / debasing a company’s brand.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Wait… This article is dated Apr 1st. So by the rules of April’s fools, this means Americans under 40 are in fact absolutely absolutely delighted by capitalism, yes?

Either that or Americans over 40 too - or in other words, all Americans who aren’t grossly undeserving rich fucks - are disillusioned, which is far more likely.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago

Oh the humanity!

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago

As a Linux user of almost 30 years, compiling hundreds of kernels over the years has given me a great appreciation of pre-build kernels, and a profound gratitude for those who package them up into convenient distros that work out of the box and let me get on with the rest of my life.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Compiling kernels makes no sense anymore.

Back in the days - Linux versions 2 and below - the kernel was much less modular, and resources wasn’t as plentiful. So it often made sense to build kernels with the stuff you needed statically compiled for speed, and the rest left out fo save memory and shorten boot time. Not to mention, Lilo (the thing we used before Grub) had limitations with respect to kernel size.

Nowadays, Grub can load a kernel of any size from anywhere on the disk. There’s plenty enough memory and CPU to leave the kernel core slightly bloated with stuff almost nobody needs with zero practical impact on boot time and memory usage, and most everything else is compiled as modules and loaded as needed - again with next to no boot time or running speed impact.

If you custom-build a kernel today, you’ll boot a tiny bit faster and it’ll run a tiny bit faster, and you’ll have a tiny bit more free memory - all of which you will never notice. What you will notice however is that kernel updates are a PITA on a regular basis.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago

Absolutely! If you’re doing it to learn something, by all means compile your own kernel. Every Linux user should do that at least once in my opinion. But once the learning is done, the novelty wears off fast and it just becomes tedious.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago

This is the best thing you can do to get a perfectly working Pulseaudio installation: switch to Pipewire.

Honestly, give it a try it: it’s easy to do, totally reversible and Pipewire is probably already installed on your system if it’s recent. Pulseaudio is such a turd, you’ll kick yourself for not having switched earlier.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

My work machine isn’t too unusual, apart that it has 52 USB devices connected. And here’s something you may not know: Linux can’t enumerate more than 16 USB ports if the root is configured as USB3, so I had to force all the ports to run in USB2 mode - which is fine in this case, since most of them are serial ports.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago

I’m not sure it’s a kernel limitation or a hardware limitation. But it does throw an error in syslog when you connect the 17th device. Not as USB2 though.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago

Yeah I figured it might be something like that. But I wasn’t sure it wasn’t a kernel limit - or even a limit in the USB3 specification - because I actually only have one USB3-capable device connected (my cellphone). All the other devices are low-bandwidth USB2 FTDI USB serial converters. I thought it couldn’t be a bandwidth issue when all but one device can only use a fraction of what’s available.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago

I had no idea what you’re talking about so I had to look it up 🙂

I think you’re making assumptions on what I need many serial ports for and it’s nothing like what you think.

I work for a company that makes measuring instruments that talk serial (RS232, RS422 and UART), we have many variants of our products and I’m tired of plugging and unplugging devices to the same serial ports to test code. Also, I can’t do that remotely when I work from home. So I have many serial ports and all the different devices I need to test my code on regularly are all plugged in and powered at the same time.

No lighting here 🙂

ExtremeDullard , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I’ve had 3 laptops with AMD GPUs in the past - including the last one I still own that use in my shop - and my personal experience so far with Linux is that I’m about ready to kill someone: the machines are unstable, the displays get corrupted, they don’t wake up from sleep…

This last AMD GPU laptop I have (Vega 6 chipset) needs rebooting on a regular basis, and only kind of works okay with an older 5-series kernel.

Having said that, all the bad experiences I’ve had with AMDGPU were with machines older than 3 years. If you say the hardware has improved, I’m glad to hear that. But one thing is for sure: the latest driver is just as buggy and unreliable as it ever was on older hardware.

Maybe newer chipsets with newer drivers now work well. But you know what? I swore I’d never EVER get another machine that requires amdgpu.ko. I’ll go Intel graphics, it’s just safer.

ExtremeDullard , 3 months ago

Linux Mint - any version.

ExtremeDullard , 3 months ago

I live in a country where Framework doesn’t officially ship. I asked them if I could buy and pay for shipping out here in the sticks, as a special order.

Framework’s answer was a hard no.

I kept telling them “What part of TAKE MY MONEY I DON’T CARE ABOUT THE COST OF SHIPPING don’t you understand? I want to buy a laptop from you, I’m telling you to wave the warranty and I’ll pay for shipping no matter how expensive, and you refuse???”

But they refused.

So fuck Framework, sadly.

As for Linus Sebastian investing in their company, that one I didn’t know. That doesn’t make me all warm and fuzzy because, I don’t know why, Linus is one of the most phenomenally irritating Youtuber in Youtubeland. I can’t stand listening to the man.

I know it’s totally subjective, he’s really pro in what he does and I have nothing against him, but it’s visceral: I can’t stand the sight of him. His investing in Framework makes me want a Framework laptop less - although I fully admit it’s not rational at all.

ExtremeDullard , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Bullshit. I asked them to take my payment and throw a laptop in the mail like some ordinary shmuck I would have bought a laptop privately from. I live in a Scandinavian country, not in Mumbo-Jumbo land. The parcel will arrive. I’ll take care of import duties and everything: all they have to do is package the laptop, put a sticker with my address on it, drive to the post office and forget about it. I even offered to pay them extra for the aggravation. They refused.

ExtremeDullard , 3 months ago

How is this infuriating?

You haven’t been taken for a fool. You haven’t been taken by surprise. Thule isn’t an unavoidable monopoly you have to give money to.

If you feel it’s overpriced, you can, ya know… not buy Thule.

ExtremeDullard , 3 months ago

I go to work for a dollar salary. I don’t get up in the morning and go to work every day because it makes me feel warm and fuzzy. I get my emotions with my family and my friends.

ExtremeDullard , 3 months ago

I have an AMDGPU machine - a hateful HP laptop with a Vega 6 chipset - and the display regularly goes garbled when I switch VTs. I too am looking for a way to “reset the graphics card” and cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/N/amdgpu_gpu_recover ain’t it: it resets it alright, but after that you get a frozen image and X is dead.

Maybe Wayland survives that but Xorg definitely doesn’t.

The only reliable graphics card reset solution I’ve every found was to close then reopen the laptop to force the machine to go to sleep, then wake up and go through the restart rigmarole cleanly. I wish there was a way to do that sleep-wakeup routing with a keyboard shortcut, but I haven’t found one.

I think the real solution is to buy a decent replacement laptop though.