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TheBananaKing

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TheBananaKing ,

When my kid started out using the internet, it was over-the-shoulder supervision to start out, then slowly dropping to in-the-room supervision (the PC in the living room), and progressively less over time, with the clearly stated proviso that I would occasionally be glancing over history just to make sure he wasn’t getting caught up in anything horrible, but that I wouldn’t be going into any kind of detail. At 13, he got his own PC in his room, and I left him to it.

I’m a very firm believer that you don’t attempt technical solutions to administrative problems. Privacy is important and monitoring is shit. You equip your kid with the tools and the supervised-experience to make good decisions, and once they can balance by themselves you let go of the bike.

Teach them to do dangerous things safely, that’s parenting in a nutshell.

(actually to clear up a misconception: to teach a kid to ride a bike, you hold the shoulders, not the bicycle. With the extra feedback they can actually compensate and learn to balance; if you hold the bike itself it just weirdly fights them and their cerebellum never gets it)

TheBananaKing ,

Entirely context dependent.

Who’s cooking tonight? Me, and if it’s sandwiches, salad, etc - still counts.

No cooking in the room. Combining sliced bread with sliced cheese out of the bag - doesn’t count.

TheBananaKing ,

Anyone who pushes jira is a waste of fucking carbon, and I hope they never find happiness.

TheBananaKing ,

If you want twenty minutes of rage-filled ranting, ask me about vscode-server sometime.

TheBananaKing ,

Congratulations you just invented magenta

TheBananaKing ,

Two things I need to ask:

  • What inspired this question, exactly, and
  • Can I have some, please?
TheBananaKing ,

bash

TheBananaKing ,

A file comes in two parts: the actual blocks of data that hold the file itself, and a directory entry with the name of the file, and the location of the first block.

When you delete a file, it only scrubs out the directory entry, and re-lists the data blocks as available for use.

TheBananaKing ,

If you actually fill the drive with zeroes, the chances of anyone getting anything back are somewhere between fuck and all.

Old MFM drives (tech likely as old as your parents) had a theoretical exploit for recovering erased data.

With modern tech, that loophole was firmly closed; even state-level actors would be shit outta luck.

TheBananaKing ,

My brother in christ, you need some Hatchie.

Hatchie - Rooftops

Hatchie - Giving the World Away

Why 🤷‍♂️ do users 👨‍💻 dislike 👎 the use ✅ of emojis 😀 on Lemmy 🐭?

Ok, the title was an overuse of emojis as a joke. But seriously, I like some limited use of emojis because it helps me convey intention/emotion so that I’m less misunderstood and also adds some more feeling/fun to text content 😄

TheBananaKing ,

Because this isn’t a Spot The Dog book, and we don’t need little picture of all the nouns.

On their own they’re ambiguous and vague; with the matching word they’re completely redundant.

What good does it do to say “I had pizza [little picture of pizza] for lunch”?

I’ll use the occasional :) or such as befits the tone, but pointless hieroglyphics are pointless and annoying.

TheBananaKing ,

It’s true. Badminton players will never ever get laid.

TheBananaKing ,

Fandom is endorsement; the HP IP has become a huge anti-trans flag.

Every time people invoke it, they wave that flag some more, and mark it as an acceptable thing to stand under.

Let it die, both financially and culturally.

TheBananaKing ,

Hell yeah, though I prefer untoasted multigrain - also some cracked black pepper, maybe a little parsley or chives.

TheBananaKing ,

yay more plastic we didn’t have enough

TheBananaKing ,

When you hollow out the middle class (in the US sense of the term), people go looking for a narrative to explain it, to give them a reason they don’t get (or can’t give their children) the lifestyle they were promised in the media.

One narrative that fits is corporate greed, late-stage capitalism, enshittification and staggering corruption.

Another narrative, however, is all this rampant social change going on, people changing the demographics, changing the rules, changing definitions, changing the comfortable rules of thumb they were used to - and now everything’s shit, the two must be connected, we need to slam the brakes and catch our breath, perhaps even go backwards, and maybe conditions will follow suit. Even if they don’t, change is a loss of control, and that’s scary. We need to pull our heads in, hunker down and take back what’s rightfully ours from those we’ve been forced to share it with.

Once people start looking through that lens, everything starts self-selecting to fit - and they start thinking yeah, maybe those guys had a point.

Yes, there’s horrible shitty filter bubbles on social media and 4chan and everything else, but this stuff doesn’t take root without the underlying socioeconomic issues driving it.

As for incels - I don’t think people realise just how much social privilege is involved in having a peer group during childhood and adolescence to develop the give and take of social skills necessary for actually courting a partner. Consider the weird kids, the fat kids, the (disproportionally) poor kids, the ones with a fucked up home life, who didn’t get to form stable relationships, who didn’t get the practice at human-wrangling, who maybe ended up in a socially-isolating job, who had no ‘third place’ to hang out with people, to socialise and to meet people they might be interested in.

And once people start out without social skills, it can be really hard to pick them up; the embarrassment and exclusion that can follow small fuckups get exponentially worse as time goes on. And you don’t have to be painfully awkward, you just have to… not have game. Just enough to kick you to the bottom of the rankings, so failure (or the likelihood thereof) stacks up and becomes progressively discouraging, so you don’t try and don’t get practice.

And then it’s the same situation: the world doesn’t work for them the way they were told it would; they do all the things that they’ve heard were supposed to work (but without any of the nuance needed to do it successfully), and it just doesn’t.

For some of them, they feel like they’re getting singled out to get ripped off, or that the whole damn system is rigged; it’s a big club and they aren’t in it, as it were. So they look for a narrative, they look for someone to blame, they look for the bad guy, they look for a coherent explanation of why they’re the victim here. And of course that spirals out of control and ends up in a very bad place.

TheBananaKing ,

Nah, I’m just old - and I was the weird homeschooled kid; there but for sheer blind undeserved luck go I.

TheBananaKing ,

As for helping - I think that once they get far enough down the path, there’s probably not much you can do for them. But compassion is always a good thing no matter who you spend it on.

As is sparing a thought for the poorly-socialised, and for the lack of opportunities people have to just hang out in any kind of casual social setting, if you’re not already part of a friend group.

Someone works a shit job in a dingy office with three people they hate and no general public flowing through, they’re exhausted at the end of the day and even if they had a place to go they just want to go home. Weekends are for laundry and chores and recovering from the week - and besides, what are they going to do, head to some bar and spend all their money drinking alone, just getting aloner?

Most of the opportunities out there rely on having either a pre-existing set of people to hang out with, or enough acquired charisma that they wouldn’t be in that situation in the first place.

Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.

Why are so many leaders in tech evil?

I remember when I was growing up, tech industry has so many people that were admirable, and you wanted to aspire to be in life. Bill Gates, founders of Google Larry Page, Sergey brin, Steve Jobs (wasn’t perfect but on a surface level, he was still at least a pretty decent guy), basically everyone involved in gaming from Xbox...

TheBananaKing ,

Resources and influence will always drunkard’s-walk into the hands of the unscrupulous and manipulative, pretty much by definition.

They’re going to be drawn to it, they’ll fight dirtier for it, and they’ll use the power it gives them to prevent anyone else from taking it away.

Big Tech is a huge source of both, so it would be amazing if the people on top of the heap weren’t massive piles of shit.

TheBananaKing ,

Until a couple of years ago, we had a brand of cheese called ‘Coon’, here in Australia.

The word isn’t used as a slur over here, and the brand was simply named after the founder about 150 years back.

But it was getting increasingly on the nose as cultural influences from the US and everywhere kept seeping in, and it reached a point where it pretty much needed an excuse or at least an explanation.

So they renamed it; now it’s ‘Cheer’.

And at the time, there was all kinds of pearl-clutching about the malicious / disingenuous / officious / vapidly-offended / white-knighting / attention-seeking / etc / etc ‘woke crowd’ stomping in and making them change everything when it was perfectly good and harmless and stuff.

Six months later, nobody gave a single shit any more. Nobody died as a result or was even mildly inconvenienced, no great cultural traditions were lost, and contrary to several predictionsm newly-empowered wokeocrats have not risen from the shadows to re-gender everyone or whatever. It’s that cheese with the blue white and green label, nobody reads it anyway.

My point is that small token changes cost virtually nothing, and even if they achieve little in and of themselves, the mere fact of people being willing to make them is of benefit. Small courtesies, you know? Returning your shopping cart. Smiling at passing dogs. It models kindness and consideration, and promotes the idea that those things have value.

Which is not to suggest that we must avoid giving offense at all consts; far from it. I’m one of those stereotypicallly abrasive genX types raised on ideals of free speech, punk rock, uncomfortable truths and loudly pointing out the elephant in the room no matter how many toes get stepped on. But when there isn’t some burning issue that needs to be addressed, niceties be damned… then yeah, small courtesies. Give people that extra bit of room even if they don’t strictly needed. It’s nice to be nice.

Look back a handful of decades at all those cultural relics that your grandparents considered harmless and invisible. Asking people to drop them may have attracted ridicule and suspicion at the time, but looking back at some of them… oh dear god, really?

Hell, I remember The Black And White Minstrel Show on TV, and if you don’t remember it yourself, it’s far worse than you’re imagining.

I like the world better without things like that, even the little seemingly-trivial ones, and even if it seems like empy virtue-signalling while you’re cleaning them up.

TheBananaKing ,

I’ve often said “What do we want? Police to face accountability when they commit crimes! What do we actually get? We’re going to use the term ‘main’ instead of ‘master’ for programming things!”

The other thing is that the big stuff is shored up by all the small stuff.

The reason you can’t get police held accountable for crimes, ferinstance, is because there’s a hundred shitty racist / sexist / classist / etc attitudes locking down the idea that the police are both besieged by and protecting us from an underclass of people who deserve neither compassion, rights or justice. Look at the people leaping on the ‘he was no angel’ bandwagon, for god’s sake.

If you want to topple the big overt heinous idea, you need to wash away the soil its roots are sunk into and that’s banked up round its trunk making it look like an inherent part of the landscape.

A spoonful at a time, if need be. It all helps.

TheBananaKing ,

Using an ethnic stereotype as a logo/mascot is a bit whiffy, no? Ramp it up a bit and take a look at the Robertson’s Jam ‘golliwog’ logo.

Maybe a different degree, but certainly the same smell. It’s just not a good look in this day and age.

TheBananaKing ,

I mean not really, kind of the opposite.

Touch grass is a call to action - to discard the convenient abstractions enabled by words alone, and to embrace the messy, gritty complexity of physical reality itself.

The allegory of the cave is the opposite: a wry lament about the inherent limitations of perception itself. You can’t experience physical reality at all; you’re just a bot in the chatroom of your senses, and there’s no such thing as stepping outside it. Your senses may be a lot more detailed than words, but it’s only a matter of degree.

TheBananaKing ,

the military-sartorial complex

TheBananaKing ,

World’s on fire, grab some marshmallows and a stick.

World wants to make you miserable, be happy out of sheer spite.

Listen to more ska: yeah we’re going to hell, but I have a trumpet.

TheBananaKing ,

Most useful thing was actually a $2 key wallet. Stupid, but it was actually really hard to find the most basic keyring-with-wrap that wasn’t trying to be a card wallet or have fancy dangly bits or whatever. Just an oblong of fake leather, two studs and a split ring, so my keys don’t chew holes in my pocket.

TheBananaKing ,

Give people power, and they will seek transgression as proof of that power. What’s the point of being supreme earthly authority over people if you have to just sit there and follow the rules? Rules are for little people, are you calling me a little person? Watch me prove my status by committing abominations and not getting punished!

This is especially the case when you load up the stakes with anxieties and resentments and jockeying for power with others and cognitive dissonance and all that jazz. Now they don’t just want to prove their made-man status, they need to. And that’s not even including malignant narcissism in the mix.

And the thing is, there’s a whole category of people who are legitimately impressed by this, who see rule-following as a hallmark of losers, and rule-flouting as a hallmark of winners.

See also: trump voters, cart narcs, anti-maskers, karens etc etc.

The priesthood is an absolute magnet for these kinds of people - and also a magnet for people struggling with shame, hoping to overcome it by being all holy-like, for instance, existing pedophiles.

And on top of that, corrupt power structures like this very often have a culture of mutually-assured destruction: people end up required to do something horribly incriminating themselves so they can’t blow the whistle on others - and once they start down that road, the justifications start piling up. See also David Cameron and the pig, and police in general.

Layer on a teaching that the reputation of the organisation must be protected even at the cost of people’s own children, and yeah, perfect storm.

No way in hell has this only been happening for the last few decades; it’s only in that timeframe that the church’s power has diminished enough for word to get out.

TheBananaKing ,

The issue is the coverups and deliberate efforts of the organisation to protect the people doing it and keep them in business.

5% of the general populace with the tendency isn’t nearly the same kind of problem as 5% of a group that has extended access to children, the power to blackmail both the victims and the parents, and the knowledge that they’ll get safely moved on to pastures greener if their stomping ground starts getting risky.

Weird guy on the corner is a risk.

Person you’re forced to spend entire days with unsupervised, and who claims the ability to have your entire family tortured forever if there’s any trouble, and has an entire global organisation watching his back, rather a lot more of one.

How do I know if tinnitus is some sort of a placebo effect?

What if I am just imagining the high pitch sound in my mind whenever I hear about or think of tinnitus just like how someone tells you to imagine a whale and you form a mental image of a whale? I don’t pay attention to the noise while I’m busy doing stuff but once I think about it, it is as hard to stop noticing it similar...

TheBananaKing ,

Scratch an E inside your glasses. Now you don’t have tinnitus, it’s just really intense reading. Chaotic stoicism for the win.

Tinnitus sucks.

TheBananaKing OP ,

well, and the frying part. The idea was to end up with texture, similar to lao gan ma.

I think imma have to try it.

YSK to lose weight, fill up with foods low in caloric density and high in fiber, like fruits and vegetables. This can trigger satiety without the overload of calories and beats going hungry long term.

Why YSK: many countries have issues with weight, such as mine with 74% of US adults being overweight or obese. The global weight loss industry is over $200 billion yearly, with many influencers, pills, and surgeries promising quick results with little effort. These often come with side effects, or don’t work long term....

TheBananaKing ,

Better: just learn to live with not feeling satiated all the time.

Not that you shouldn’t make vegies a significant part of your diet, just that a big part of the lifestyle change is learning to be hungry between meals as a normal and non-distressing thing.

TheBananaKing ,

I am all about keeping it sustainable; nobody has willpower longterm. Any fool can come up with a diet of rabbit food and have amazing results for a month before their brain goes postal on them and they start inhaling cheeseburgers nonstop. Trust me, I totally get that. We always attribute vast reserves of motivation and discipline to ourselves that we just don’t have, and the results aren’t pretty.

But on the other side of the coin, your brain can get stuck in a short-term reward loop, and it howls blue murder when you first try to break out of it.

I’m an stress-eater and a boredom-eater, and if the loop gets out of control, not constantly snacking becomes stressful in and of itself, and yeah that’s a complete trainwreck.

But what I’ve found is that after a surprisingly short time of acclimating yourself to controlled amounts of hunger, you can break that loop. Your brain re-learns the difference between not-full and actually-need-calories, and only sees the latter as a problem.

What started out feeling like a catastrophe that you had to white-knuckle through just turns into a boring fact that takes little to no willpower at all to put up with at all.

It’s a really good investment of effort, and makes the whole process a lot easier.

TheBananaKing ,

I find that when food just isn’t working to abate hunger, what I actually need is salt.

Couple of fingers of jalapeno brine, the relief is incredible.

TheBananaKing ,

I’m a sysadmin. We’re a Linux shop, I spend my life deep in the guts of Linux boxes, both server and desktop.

And for my daily-driver both at work and at home, I use windows.

The UI and overall UX are just better. The annoying bullshit I make a living knowing my way around, I don’t have to think about.

For actual development or backend services, of course you want a Linux box. Proper logging, proper tools, build shit, pipe it together, automate stuff and get down and technical when it breaks. Doing that on windows is absolutely hell.

But on windows, the volume control just works, I never have to delete lockfiles to get my browser to open, my desktop login doesn’t terminate if something in .profile returned nonzero, I can play every video game out there without having to fuck around, I can use native versions of real apps, I don’t have package-management dependency hell, all the pieces were designed to work with each other, and the baseline cognitive load needed to just use my computer is zero, which frees up my brain to focus on my actual work, or for playing games and fucking around on the internets.

TheBananaKing ,

I do know about window managers, thanks.

And that’s part of the problem: they all have their own slightly different infrastructure that relies on slightly intricate and not-quite-standard plumbing.

Dialogs not opening, or those weird invisible 30-second timeouts opening an application becasue dbus isn’t happy because one of the xorg init scripts messed some XDG path or set the wrong GTK_* option, or XAUTHORITY is pointing somewhere weird.

Whichever user is logged in locally should be allowed to talk to the device they plugged in via usb? Well that’s just an unreasonable thing to expect to happen by default, let me spend 20 minutes cooking up a udev script to chown it on creation.

Users managing to set their default terminal to some random script they were working on (seriously, how?). Or they initialised their xfce4 profile with the blank-toolbar option and now can’t work out how to launch anything.

Notification popups? Sure, the toolbar will let you add one, but nothing communicates with it by default lol.

also jesus christ kde.

And I’m talking about the built-in functionality of the desktop environment wrt package management, not separate applications.

Sure, it’s nice to be able to apt-get upgrade and just get everything all at once - when everything is happy with everything else.

But when you get conflicting dependencies and you have to take time out to track down what libpyzongo0-util is used for or what is going to break later on if you just purge it because people use cutesy package names that are worse than Ruby libraries in terms of communicating what they’re actually for, and do we need this thing for the core platform or it it form some random crap that was installed ad-hoc and used precisely once, it gets old.

Like I say you need this amount of flexibility and complexity for development and deployment and network services and all the rest. Anyone using Windows for much more than file-print-office-browser-gaming has more masochism in them than I can comprehend.

But for that same very minimal set of core use-cases, you don’t need (or, I’d argue, want) flexibility or complexity, you want it to be simple and robust with JOWTDI. And for everything else, you ssh into your linux box and do it there. I was amazed to discover that Windows Terminal is actually really nice; combine that with an X server and maybe a VNC client, and you’ve got the best of both worlds.

And yes, Windows has all kinds of annoying shit of its own - but that mostly pops up when you want to do interesting things on it, not when you just want to look at cat videos on the internet.

TheBananaKing ,

Still less than your mum

TheBananaKing ,

P1: I cannot cope with the idea that my mind is a mundane physical process

P2: God is… wait, fuck we aren’t doing god any more

C: It must be quantum

TheBananaKing ,

There’s no outer edge of a gravity well. It just tapers off, infinitely.

Imagine a big frozen lake, with a post stuck up from the centre, and a rope tied to it. You’ve got big wet-iceblock boots on, but you have have hold of the rope.

If you’re just standing still, then reaching the post is stupid-easy, you just haul on it, and you slide right on in.

But now imagine you’re not just standing there, you’re whizzing hell for leather round the edge of the lake at 50 MPH.

You haul on that rope with all your might, it doesn’t get you into the middle; all it does is stop you flying out into the weeds.

You simply can’t get there from here, your turning circle is too damn big.

That’s orbit. That’s how it works. If you’re going past a thing fast enough, you can’t turn hard enough to hit it.

TheBananaKing ,

Zed-shell, soo-dough, s-s-h

TheBananaKing ,

Less of a tongue twister

TheBananaKing ,

Sex work is work.

The people that do it deserve respect, and all the social and legal protections that attach to any other kind of work.

Your own preferred attitude to sex isn’t the point.

TheBananaKing ,

Untoasted multigrain, throw in some salt and pepper and maybe some parsley or chives.

This trick is to go light on the mayo.

TheBananaKing ,

Low-fat cheese is horrible, tbh. It’s like eating slices of vinyl eraser, and does not spark cheese-joy. Cardio-risk-wise it’s like getting healthy by smoking half-length cigarettes: everybody loses.

There’s no good alternatives that fill every niche, but humnmus is a damn good start. It’s got (good) fat and protein and it’s salty and umami, and feels like you’ve actually eaten something.

TheBananaKing ,

My cholesterol ratio was becoming of-concern a couple of years back.

I replaced most of the animal fat in my diet with olive oil and the like, and a year later all my levels were acbsolutely fine.

TheBananaKing ,

local58 is amazing; check out their other stuff :)

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