DNA is one that concerns me quite a lot. I can see some arguments in favour or retaining DNA on file for a longer term in certain cases - persistent sex criminals comes to mind - but I really think there should be tighter controls about just indiscriminately gathering DNA, and if you’re not found guilty of anything that info should be expunged and this should be independently audited IMO.

Also facial recognition for similar reasons. This feels like it should be the sort of thing to me that needs a warrant to be used, like searching a person’s home. Governments shouldn’t be allowed to just endlessly trawl through the faces of everybody who’s out in public for whatever reason they like. And using it to just sweep protests to (presumably) make a database of protestors should be a big no-no.

Yeah I’m doing a playthrough on that right now. Only got as far as coal power but I’m really enjoying it.

I need to use it to look stuff up once in a while, but I try to avoid it whenever possible because of the ridiculous amount of fucking about it takes just to make that site usable. It used to need reddit enhancement suite, then they brought in the new reddit so then it was RES and a thing to force it to use old reddit, now they’re blocking VPNs and most of the old apps so now if I have to go there I try to just use a random Redlib instance.

If you’re a piece of shit corrupt politician, he’s a godsend. He’s loud and distracting, corrupt as hell, doesn’t give a fuck about any sort of ethics as long as he’s getting his, plus he’s dumb as shit and has a massive ego. The amount of mid-level corruption you can get away with while everyone’s looking at Trump has to be insane, and all you have to do is chuck him a wad of cash or tell him he’s great once or twice a year.

They’re going to prop him up for as long as they can, make out like bandits and when his cholesterol finally catches up to him and he dies, they’ll all scuttle off back into the woodwork and in ten years you won’t be able to find anyone who admits to having supported him at all.

I used to have a not well known webcomic and would get death threats/“kill yourself” messages pretty regularly, so yeah for drawing a cartoon would be mine I guess! They never used to bother me especially though, I thought they were funny. I used to have a page up where I’d post the dumbest ones lol.

It’d be neat if data centers could also be desalination plants. IE, you extract the seawater, desalinate it, use it for cooling, then add the fresh water into the general water supply when it’s done with. I’m sure there are probably many reasons why that wouldn’t work though.

Also, the word doublespeak isn’t from Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four he used the term Newspeak, meaning a sort of clipped form of language designed to limit expression of thought, and doublethink, the practice of holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time and believing both to be true, but he never used the word doublespeak.

Interestingly though, it actually predates Nineteen Eighty-Four, but nobody really knows who coined it exactly.

TBH I don’t really believe anything NASA says when it comes to stuff like this. It’s basically been ~5 years away from going back to the moon and ~20 years from going to Mars for my entire life, and I’m not a young person.

I’ve gotten exactly one thing to ever run properly in Bottles, and that was an accident lol. Which is weird because I can get things to run in Wine no problem, and I assumed that Bottles would be easier since it’s essentially just Wine with a GUI. But for reasons that elude me, everything I throw at Bottles just doesn’t work. I’ve even taken things that work perfectly well in Wine and setting them up in Bottles with the exact same settings (as far as I can tell) and they just don’t. work. I assume it’s something I’m doing wrong, but there’s no real reason to spend the time to figure it out when Wine is right there getting the job done.

As a non-American, this is definitely something that’s been an annoyance for as long as I can remember. Whenever the US decides it wants a war, every other country in the world is expected to join in (the “Coalition of the Willing” springs to mind) or else be bullied at best (Freedom Fries) or labelled an enemy at worst just for not wanting to spend huge amounts of resources and hundreds/thousands of lives on a war that’s nothing to do with them.

But then when it comes to any sort of international agreement that would benefit everyone such as the Paris Climate Agreement, the Ottawa Treaty, the Rome Statute of the ICC, or the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, guess who doesn’t step up?

The US seems to want all the power of being the World Police, without any responsibility towards the stewardship of the planet. They could pretty much get away with it so far IMO because they were so powerful, but now that the political system there seems to be falling apart, who knows? I am certain though that if things continue to get worse and the US faces a serious crisis like another civil war or something, they’ll find a way to make it everybody else’s problem as well.

I stopped using Youtube a few years ago when one of my videos that wasn’t monetized and had a very clearly public domain piece of music in it got flagged by some bot for copyright infringement (on the public domain music) and Youtube monetized my video without my permission and put ads in it so that they could send the money to the bot that falsely flagged my video.

The thing that annoys me the most about it (well, aside from the massive invasion of civil liberties and general dystopian behaviour) is that we don’t even get any of the fringe benefits of it. By that I mean, if I contact the government because I need some information about myself (recent examples: vaccine history, polling information, National Insurance query etc.) they act as if they’ve never been contacted by a person before and seem to immediately go into a panic and send you in a big loop of Other People Who Might Have It, with the end goal seeming to be “nobody knows where it is, let’s just hope they give up and stop asking.”

Like if the government must insist on tracking every single thing I do and say and look at and place I go to, the least they could do is actually have that info to hand so I can use it too. It seems the more they track us, the less capable they are of actually doing anything useful with that information.

I actually didn’t know you could nest Virtual Desktops within activities, so that was nice. Now I can make my setup even more absurdly complicated for anyone who’s not me to use lol.

As a Brit who has seen the UK government’s ill thought through and unworkable attempts at police state bullshit go through the process a few times now, I’m going to predict: VPN use goes up massively, the government starts talking about banning VPNs without considering that this would break half the internet, then some wealthy business donor has a quiet word to them because businesses need VPNs to function, but they can’t publicly back down because they already called everyone who opposed it a pedo. So they pick one or two VPN companies (whichever ones have the most foreign-sounding names), have the tabloids run a propaganda campaign about how evil they are, then ban them even though they aren’t based in the UK and it makes no difference to anything, then they’ll claim they won and the laws will stay on the books forever but nobody will bother to enforce them and everything will carry on as before.

Half-baked bullshit. You can get around it with a VPN or a copy of Death Stranding 2

Yeah I have the Libre Colour and it’s great! The pen feels good, it lets you do what you want with it (eg. using Calibre to strip the DRM off your books and loading them via USB, installing KOReader etc.) and it works well with Libby for getting eBooks from the library (at least in Canada.)

A while back I heard someone describe LLMs as a magic 8-ball with infinite answers that uses math to nudge it towards the answer you want.

I see AI art as essentially like a commission. As in, before AI if you couldn’t draw something, you’d commission someone who could draw it to make it for you. Then you’d own that piece of art, but you didn’t create it. You described what you wanted to someone else and they created it. Same deal with AI except instead of a person it’s, as I heard someone describe it recently, a magic 8-ball with infinite answers and some math to nudge it in the right direction lol.

The usual tech support search:

• First hit is a thread describing your exact problem, marked as [SOLVED]. Clicking it goes to a 404.

• Second hit is a thread describing your exact problem that goes to an actual thread, but the message has been edited to just say “Solved” with no record of what was done.

• Third hit is a thread describing almost your exact problem, with the first response calling the poster a noob for asking and then 15 pages of arguments.

• Fourth hit is a thread describing something in the same general area as your problem, which you try anyway and makes the thing you’re trying to fix break in a different way, but it’s progress at least.

• Actual solution is somewhere between the 5th and 8th hit, or you give up and come back to it in about a week and solve it instantly without trying for some fucking reason.

So to answer the question, I can usually tell I’m getting close to the solution when I say “Oh for fuck’s sake” as I’m closing tabs lol.

As a side note, a couple of things that might be handy for you:

Bottles is a GUI for running Wine things that might make it a bit easier to navigate. It’s helped me out a few times.

Also there’s an AppDB on the Wine site where you can search for specific software to find out how well it runs/tweaks that people have used etc.

ALSO yeah games are in a pretty good place on Linux nowadays. I have a Steam Deck and it runs a surprising amount of stuff, even things that aren’t listed as being compatible. I think the main source of trouble is the online AntiCheat stuff, that’s not always compatible with Linux (although sometimes those work too, I think it just depends on the game.) There’s also protondb for checking which games work in Linux.

Hopefully some of that is helpful!