There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

MrMcGasion

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

MrMcGasion ,

I think it was an interview with Seth Meyers, but somewhere Heidi said she had seen them in costume, but Mikey’s lip prosthetic/makeup was much more extreme in the live performance than in rehearsal, and that was what caught her off guard and made her break.

MrMcGasion ,

And if my actions in a game cause chaos, it’s much more limited to a silly little game world, rather than ruining innocent lives IRL.

MrMcGasion ,

While I would never wish for a trans woman to have to endure that kind of environment, I’d love to see a trans woman take that as a challenge and go win just to make the “you can always tell” crowd lose their minds. Unfortunately it would probably be super dangerous considering how violent people can get when they discover they can’t always tell, so it’s probably a horrible idea. But a person can dream.

MrMcGasion ,

Yeah, I know a lot of the smaller, independent search engines are lacking, but the people using the “udm=14” trick to remove Google’s AI results now, as if that won’t be removed as soon as Google needs to show investors the AI is more profitable.

MrMcGasion ,

They know the meaning. Most of the ones I grew up around chose to believe that since “separation of church and state” doesn’t appear in the Constitution that it was a fringe idea a couple of the founding fathers had, that “liberals” today have made into a bigger deal than it should be so they can keep “persecuting” Christians.

Christian nationalism takes all the dogmatic thinking they have about the Bible being instructions from an infallible, all knowing God, that must be followed, and applies that thinking to the US Constitution and the founding fathers. Once you’re in the mindset of reading something like it’s absolute truth that can’t be questioned (at least the parts that tell you you’re wrong, the parts that say I’m wrong are different), it’s easy to get stuck in that mindset for everything you read.

MrMcGasion ,

To add to this, Scarlett Johansson took on Disney and they settled. And Disney is like the final boss of litigious companies (either them or Nintendo). If she has the same legal team for this, and they think she has a case against OpenAI, this could open the door for OpenAI to get rightfully clobbered for their tech-bro ignoring of copyright laws.

MrMcGasion ,

Yes, if this is regarding the stimulus checks, then wouldn’t it all having been spent be good? Yeah, we spent it, we stimulated the economy during a time when the government decided it needed stimulation. Unless the conversation is about the economy needing more stimulation and that giving stimulus money to consumers works better than tax cuts for the wealthy, because the working class actually put the stimulus into circulation rather than hoarding it.

MrMcGasion ,

One of the companies I frequently have to call for work gives a high volume of calls due to the storm systems moving across the United States. They added it like a year or so ago when California had all that flooding and the east coast had a couple of hurricanes. But it’s still on there as an excuse.

MrMcGasion ,

Not to deny any of the very real economic reasons for this (everything from low wages, pensions being replaced by 401Ks, etc) but it’s also important to remember that the babyboomer generation was the largest ever generation until millennials claimed that record, so any statistic that looks primarily at raw numbers as opposed to percentages is going to be higher simply because there are more people.

Axios: Biden told Netanyahu U.S. won't support an Israeli counterattack on Iran (www.axios.com)

“I told Prime Minister Netanyahu that Israel demonstrated a remarkable capacity to defend against and defeat even unprecedented attacks — sending a clear message to its foes that they cannot effectively threaten the security of Israel,” Biden said.

MrMcGasion ,

I’m not saying he wouldn’t be pro-Israel, but considering how much his words say one thing on the campaign trail, and his actions are generally just whatever he thinks will benefit him the most in the moment, it wouldn’t surprise me if Iran could sway him into looking the other way.

MrMcGasion ,

A heist at the Vatican is my best chance at being able to afford retirement at this point, I’d appreciate if one of the more ethical options to steal from isn’t destroyed before I can get to it.

MrMcGasion ,

You’re in. Now we’ve just got to make sure we get into the right vault and not one that’s just full of the “relics” of body parts from dead saints.

MrMcGasion ,

Eh, there are plenty of old quotes that don’t hold up, and the last 1500 years haven’t really been that peaceful. I think it’s fair to be critical of a philosophy that’s been around that long and has really just been better at marketing increased military spending than actually successful at building real peace.

MrMcGasion ,

I remember this with nursing degrees when I was in college in the late 2000s, there was a big deal made about a shortage of nurses around that time, and a bunch of kids were convinced they were going to make bank and have guaranteed jobs when they graduated, then they started graduating and flooded the market. A bunch of them ended up staying in school for grad degrees in other fields, since they couldn’t find nursing jobs.

MrMcGasion ,

The economic loss of losing a generation and a half of workers who will be unable to save for retirement and will put a giant strain on the economy in 40-50 years when their brains and bodies are shot, but they can’t afford to retire because the money that they could have set aside went to paying student loans. It’s going to be way cheaper in the long run and a better investment to forgive student loans now, than to wait for all those people to hit retirement age and not be able to afford to retire, holding down jobs that should be opening for new generations and screwing over the youth once again. Not that newer generations will be as big, since those strapped with student loans are choosing not to have kids because they can’t afford it. Also if our social safety net for retirees (Social Security, Medicare, etc) is already strained, we’d better give people the best chance we can at being able to afford to save for their own retirements.

If anything, the ROI on paying off student debt is better long term than the auto and bank bailouts - because the cost of not doing it is going to affect the economy for generations.

MrMcGasion ,

34 to be specific - I only know because I’m several months older than her, and it’s always nice to have someone successful my age to compare myself to and feel worse about myself and how unsuccessful I am (I’m obviously joking a bit).

MrMcGasion ,

Also a reminder that many sports segregated by sex/gender were because the men got upset at being bested by women and changed the rules to protect their egos.

MrMcGasion ,

I remember seeing an interview with the model, who at the time of the interview was in her 70s or 80s, she apparently wasn’t enthusiastic about having become a common test image. But since she had technically consented to be in Playboy (which was only a magazine at the time), there wasn’t anything she could do to stop it. I think in this case it’s probably best to stop using her image specifically, as it does kinda get into a weird messy situation of consent, and how her consent to be in a magazine morphed through technology into something more “permanent” than she originally realized. There are plenty of other models who would absolutely be down for that, and given enough time, knowing how nerds are, there will be other test images of women. But I think it’s probably for the best that this one gets retired from this use.

And yes, there are people who have tried to use this instance as a “there shouldn’t be images of attractive/implied nude women a standard test images, because it can cause body image issues for women who go into that field.” Which on one hand, I can see where they’re coming from, but also people take pictures of people, and some people do look better than most of us, having more diverse test images would be a good thing, because we don’t all look like that. But some do, and they’re probably going to get more pictures taken of them than the rest if us.

MrMcGasion ,

Just to add a bit of clarification, the image wasn’t just a headshot, yes that’s the part that was originally scanned and used, but it’s a cropped in section of the centerfold, a 3-page fold-out image in the magazine. If I remember the story correctly, they needed a large image to scan, and several people brought in images to scan in, and one guy brought a Playboy.

How can I bypass CGNAT by using a VPS with a public IPv4 address?

I want to move away from Cloudflare tunnels, so I rented a cheap VPS from Hetzner and tried to follow this guide. Unfortunately, the WireGuard setup didn’t work. I’m trying to forward all traffic from the VPS to my homeserver and vice versa. Are there any other ways to solve this issue?...

MrMcGasion ,

Not sure exactly how good this would work for your use case of all traffic, but I use autossh and ssh reverse tunneling to forward a few local ports/services from my local machine to my VPS, where I can then proxy those ports in nginx or apache on the VPS. It might take a bit of extra configuration to go this route, but it’s been reliable for years for me. Wireguard is probably the “newer, right way” to do what I’m doing, but personally I find using ssh tunnels a bit simpler to wrap my head around and manage.

Technically wireguard would have a touch less latency, but most of the latency will be due to the round trip distance between you and your VPS and the difference in protocols is comparatively negligible.

MrMcGasion ,

If you browse the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) for 5 minutes, you’ll probably see a bunch of microsoft.com email addresses, and it’s been that way for years. I understand why it bothers some people, but also Linus (and a couple others) approve everything that actually gets merged, whether it’s from a microsoft employee, or a redhat employee, or anyone else. Even if microsoft wanted to pay employees to submit patches that would hurt the kernel, the chance that they’d actually be approved is so low it wouldn’t be worth their time.

MrMcGasion ,

I figured you were being genuine, but there’s usually a few people who point at Microsoft’s “embracing” of Linux as the first step in the “embrace, extend, extinguish” trope, and see any involvement by Microsoft as nefarious. When the reality is just that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services are a much larger share of their annual revenue than Windows, and Linux is a major part of their cloud offerings.

MrMcGasion ,

Putting how many games I have in each category in brackets since your screenshot included that info and I think it’s interesting data to include.

I have “Uninterested” [7] as a category for games I will probably never play. “Backlog” [33] for games I haven’t started, but do eventually want to play. “Story Started” [25] for games that I have started playing but haven’t finished the core story or made it to the credits of (some of these games have been in this category for years). A “Playing” [7] category for a few games from the “Story Started” collection that I consider as games I’m actively playing. And a “Story Complete” [91] category for games that I’ve at least reached a credits screen or otherwise finished the core game/story.

If I enjoy a game a lot, through multiple playthroughs (or at least expect to return for another playthrough at some point) it gets added to my Favorites [14].

And then there’s the 280 games in the Uncategorized list, I have played a bit of some of them, but for most of them I’d want to start over from the beginning rather than continue from where I left off.

MrMcGasion ,

I was just thinking this past week that if cocaine was legal, there’d probably be someone trying to make an industry out of scent-infused cocaine cut with vitamins or pollens or something for “health,” targeted at hipster millennials.

MrMcGasion ,

I’ll probably make the jump when Plasma 6.1 releases with their “real, fake session restore” functionality, was hoping that would make it in to Plasma 6, and I am daily driving Wayland on my laptop now, but I kinda need my programs (or at least file managers and terminal windows) to re-open the way they were between reboots.

Thanks to kscreen-doctor, I’ve been able to port most of my desktop scripts that I use for managing my multiple monitors to work on Wayland, and krdc/krfb have been a decent enough replacement for x11vnc or x2go for accessing the desktop on my home server/NAS remotely (I know, desktops on servers are considered sacrilege, but for me it’s been useful too many times to get rid of at this point).

Where Wayland currently shines for me is VR, Steam VR works better, and more consistently on Plasma Wayland than X11 at this point, which is probably more of a Valve thing than a Wayland thing. When I first got my Index, X11 worked fine, but there have been times when Steam VR on Linux being “broken” has made the news on Phoronix/Gaming on Linux, but still worked fine on Plasma Wayland (which seems to be where Valve is doing most of their SteamVR Linux testing as of late).

As an end user, I do wish that the Wayland specification was organized better, because as an outsider, it seems a lot of the bickering that goes on has more to do with everyone having different end goals. I think if they would split out the different styles of window management to have their own sub-specs or extensions and then figure out what of that could be moved into the core after everyone has built what they need would be better than their current approach of compromising their way through every little decision that doesn’t always make sense for every use case. Work together when it makes sense, but understand that there are times when that doesn’t make sense, and sometimes you can’t please every stick in the mud, and are going to have to do your own thing without them. I do get the appeal of doing things right the first time too though, even if it takes more time. But it seems like usability is always the thing that gets sacrificed when compromises are made.

Are you reusing one postgres instance for all services?

I have many services running on my server and about half of them use postgres. As long as I installed them manually I would always create a new database and reuse the same postgres instance for each service, which seems to me quite logical. The least amount of overhead, fast boot, etc....

MrMcGasion ,

That’s a big reason I actively avoid docker on my servers, I don’t like running a dozen instances of my database software, and considering how much work it would take to go through and configure each docker container to use an external database, to me it’s just as easy to learn to configure each piece of software for yourself and know what’s going on under the hood, rather than relying on a bunch of defaults made by whoever made the docker image.

I hope a good amount of my issues with docker have been solved since I last seriously tried to use docker (which was back when they were literally giving away free tee shirts to get people to try it). But the times I’ve peeked at it since, to me it seems that docker gets in the way more often than it solves problems.

I don’t mean to yuck other people’s yum though, so if you like docker, and it works for you, don’t let me stop you from enjoying it. I just can’t justify the overhead for myself (both at the system resource level, and personal time level of inserting an additional layer of configuration between me and my software).

MrMcGasion ,

I think that my skepticism and desire to have docker get out of my way, has more to do with already knowing the underlying mechanics, being used to managing services before docker was a thing, and then docker coming along and saying “just learn docker instead.” Which is fine, if it didn’t mean not only an entire shift from what I already know, but a separation from it, with extra networking and docker configuration to fuss with. If I wasn’t already used to managing servers pre-docker, then yeah, I totally get it.

MrMcGasion ,

Maybe I’ll try and give it another go soon to see if things have improved for what I need since I last tried. I do have a couple aging servers that will probably need upgraded soon anyway, and I’m sure my python scripts that I’ve used in the past to help automate server migration will need updated anyway since I last used them.

MrMcGasion ,

Meanwhile, their robots.txt doesn’t disallow GPTBot or Google Bard. So apparently they’re okay with content being stolen by for-profit companies.

MrMcGasion ,

At the executive level, no I don’t think they care or pay attention, but considering both have said “here’s how to block our crawler,” I do hope that that some mistreated developer did actually program a check in to the crawler. I still think it’s worth doing, even though I don’t fully trust them.

MrMcGasion ,

Yeah, based on his robots.txt it seems to be a Wordpress site, so he’s probably just installed an ineffective plugin to prevent copying. At least he can take solace in the fact that most of us probably aren’t any more relevant than he is.

MrMcGasion ,

$80/month for 300Mbps down/10 Mbps up, Southeastern US. Consistently get higher download speeds than advertised, currently around 350Mbps. Upload speed is never more than 10Mbps.

MrMcGasion ,

In general, yes more tabs = more RAM used, but Firefox does have a neat trick compared to Chrome that helps lower memory usage for those of us with hundreds of tabs. When you launch Chrome with a bunch of tabs open from a previous session, it actually loads them all into RAM at launch, with Firefox, it doesn’t actually load the pages of tabs from previous sessions, until you switch to them. The page titles and icons get loaded into RAM, obviously, but if you have lots of old tabs that you almost never open, the memory usage impact of lots of tabs is minimized.

MrMcGasion ,

Imagine holding on to a large, metal pipe (like a hand rail on stairs) and someone on the other end, hitting the pipe with their hand, not a big “clung”, but like they swung past it, and barely nicked the pipe with the tips of their fingers as their arm swung by. Combine that vibration with a breathy, hollowness that kinda warbles as the rubber ball contracts and expands due to the impact. The whole sound only lasts about a second - unless you were the one that got hit in the head, in which case there’s a high pitched ringing in your ears for a bit as well.

MrMcGasion ,

Agreed, there’s also plenty of people who think that just because they have a large vehicle, that they’re immune to the snow. Obviously there’s a quantity of snow that trucks are more necessary for, but I’ll admit to feeling a bit smug when I see ditches full of abandoned trucks and SUVs, as I drive by in my little front wheel drive sedan.

MrMcGasion ,

There is still a desktop overview that allows dragging windows between virtual desktops (Meta+G) unfortunately when they removed the old overview, they forgot to fully integrate the new overview, so it can’t be activated by screen edges (which is how I used to access the old desktop overview).

MrMcGasion ,

My vote would be NuTwo.

MrMcGasion ,

Source has been posted on Internet Archive (along with the latest builds for a bunch of platforms). Something will likely rise from the ashes of YuZu, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it takes a few years. Nintendo is probably gonna be extra litigious this year (even more than usual), due to them likely failing to have the Switch’s successor ready this year, and not really having a full slate of games ready, so with Switch sales projected to be down, best to lay low on anything that might get Nintendo’s attention for a while.

MrMcGasion ,

Imagine how much venture capital funding AI would lose if it was always pivoting every conversation to eating the rich.

MrMcGasion ,

So, I in no way want to argue that algorithms are better, as they are often used to manipulate and their design to drive engagement at any cost leads to plenty of their own problems.

That said, I was raised in a pretty strong echo chamber (that a good portion of my family is still firmly in). If I had been solely responsible for curating what content I got via RSS (which I did for a short period in the early 2010s). I never would have been exposed to content that challenged the worldview I was given. Ironically, it ended up being the YouTube algorithm that while it was simultaneously feeding people down the gamergate conspiracy tunnel was opening my eyes to the realities of climate change, making me less bigoted towards LGBTQ people, and helping me find the empathy that I had hidden to fit in with the world around me.

I don’t know what the answer is. On the one hand, I know how bad echo chambers can be, on the other hand, corporations and algorithms manipulate people all the time and shouldn’t be trusted either. I do think RSS had potential to be better than what we have now (where social media sites like Twitter and Digg/Reddit/Lemmy essentially act as everyone’s shared feed reader and end up putting people into new echo chambers), but I think having the chance of seeing content that challenges our worldviews has also been a good thing, that I’m not sure would happen as often if we all only read our personally-curated RSS feeds.

That said algorithms are getting more manipulative, and I may just be a lucky outlier that an algorithm happened to push in a positive direction.

MrMcGasion ,

Looks kinda like a Men in Black marketing tie-in with Vincent D’Onofrio as the baby. What can I say, the man has range.

Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret (www.nature.com)

one assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much...

MrMcGasion ,

Yeah, but LLMs like ChatGPT and the like aren’t where that advancement is being made. LLMs are driving investment in the technology, but it’s just a mostly useless investor target that just happens to run on the same hardware that can be used for useful AI-powered research. Sure, it’s pushing the hardware advancement forward maybe 10-15 years faster than it might have otherwise happened, but it’s coming with a lot of wasteful baggage as well because LLMs are the golden boy investors want to to throw money at.

MrMcGasion ,

I’ve heard that Judas went and hanged himself over the edge of a cliff, and then the rope snapped (because Judas apparently couldn’t handle hanging himself properly), and he fell into the field, where his guts spilled out.

That said, the person I heard that from is one of the Christian pastors I’m related to, whose only real claim to knowledge on the subject was a one-week “Bible tour” of Israel.

MrMcGasion ,

“So everyone could see what happened,” is the best reason I could get.

MrMcGasion ,

Looking forward to the day I can pour one out for him, and by “pour one out,” I mean a cup of piss, on his grave.

MrMcGasion ,

With all the discounts they offer it is, but technically Incogni is 12.98/month. And with as many YouTube sponsor spots as they buy, I’d imagine they’re just trying to get as many people signed up as they can, and will stop offering as many discounts once they’ve burned through their investor cash.

MrMcGasion ,

I forget who I heard it from, but some bigger YouTuber mentioned that when talking to someone at YouTube about “the algorithm” and the person who worked at YouTube suggested rather than always thinking about it being the algorithm that drives what’s popular, that it’s the users who engage with that content. In the “line goes up” capitalist mindset, the algorithms at these companies are really just designed around engagement, and keeping people hooked. The “algorithm” is just what it thinks the audience wants.

And while I think a lot of us would like to think better of ourselves, I think we all have a strong tendency to engage with ragebait, and “shocking” content. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad trait in a pre-internet world. But in the world where the shareholders always need the line to go up infinitely, all of our media gets filled with the garbage that makes the line go up the most.

In the short term, we can all try more to engage less with the kind of content, showing the algorithms that we don’t actually want that content.

In the long term, we should probably de-couple our media from the infinite-growth investor-first capitalism that has formerly-respected publications writing articles about what 5 random people said on Twitter that they can ragebait people into engaging with.

MrMcGasion ,

Honestly, let’s bring geocities back (not exactly in that form). Anything that isn’t a throwaway post on social media goes there, and you can post links to it from all the social platforms for reaching a broader audience. Then there’s a place for getting the most up to date information about an event, that doesn’t require making an account, and the person putting the event on doesn’t have to make sure posts across multiple platforms are updated with the same new information.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •