• 6 Posts
  • 43 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • azimir@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.mlDemocrats and The Left
    ·
    5 months ago

    I'm holding that saw and waiting while the fascist right continues to boil itself to death. It's a question of whether we boil with it or not.

    The Dems are a center right party and we're stuck with a (mostly) two party system because of our First Past the Post voting system. That means I vote for the one of two choices closest to me, so Dems it is in the general election.

    Give me a Ranked Choice Vote and Dems move to my #2 slot under an actual progressive party candidate.

    Fairvote.org






  • Do you think that would stop people who buy Escalades and Ford F250s? They already drive over the lines in my city because they're too wide. The vast majority of people who buy those kinds of vehicles are self-centered and selfish enough to not care if they're being dangerous in narrow lanes. They are already doing that.

    Hell, I saw a person drive their Ford F650 to fucking Starbucks last week. It barely fit into the parking lot. Not a parking spot (it definitely didn't fit into that), but even just turning and maneuvering in the lot was nearly impossible. He likely burned a gallon of gas just jockying in and out of the lot.






  • It's all about "where did today go?" I have my classes setup with gaps so I can ensure I've got materials ready, but once you have three lectures per day with gaps, that only leaves a few hours for anything else. Throw in a couple of committee meetings, a student meeting, and bam! I have 20 minutes of the day available for email, lunch, paperwork, grading, and any kind of planning whatsoever (ha!).


  • VPNs are not the security panacea that marketers would have you think they are. Using a VPN does provide some obfuscation as to your origin, but it does change your trust model. The VPN service provider may tunnel your traffic through your ISP to hide data from the ISP, but now it's visible to the VPN service provider instead.

    There are plenty of use cases for a VPN, but just like any other technology or service, you need to know what it actually does so you know what it actually achieves or doesn't achieve.



  • One thing to keep in mind is that in the US, there's very few people or companies that actually own the land that they're on. Most of the time you have the rights to use the land for certain types of things, but not actually own it. The US government (federal on down) has various ways of seizing property for its own purposes.

    There's only a handful of people who actually own the land they live on. Most of them were granted the land by prior governments (mostly Spain) before the US was a country. Their ownership was grandfathered in and has passed via inheritance through the families. Several of those family plots are in Texas and Florida. Everyone else is just allowed to stay as long as they play ball with the rules.


  • I've been doing a lot of using, testing, and evaluating LLMs and GPT-style models for generating code and text/prose. Some of it is just general use to see how it behaves, some has been explicit evaluation of creative writing, and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.

    It's an impressive piece of technology, but it's not very creative. It's meh. The results are meh. Which is to be expected since it's a statistical model that's using a large body of prior work to produce a reasonable approximation of what it's seen before. It trends towards the mean, not the best.


  • The Uni Eng department ran a SunOS email server for students and a SunOS lab for our coding projects. We were taught UNIX in the intro engineering class.
    A couple of my friends in the dorm fired up Linux servers (early Debian and RedHat systems), bought domains (3 character .coms!) and setup email servers for our friend groups. It also was a lot faster to do our C/C++ dev there because it wasn't an overloaded machine.
    Within a couple of years I had two systems, one Win98 and the other RedHat. From there it has been a winding tale of Linux distros, a stint of OpenBSD fun until SMP boards became common, the occasional Windows machine (back when I gamed more, but after Tribes 2 on Linux), and a short work-related dalliance with OSX (10.1-10.4). For the last decade it's been almost 100% Linux anymore. If there's a tool you need on a given OS, use what you need to, but if it runs on Linux I wouldn't use anything else. I've got a pile of machines for work and home, including servers (Debian), laptops/desktops (Mint), and SoC boards (Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian, etc).
    There's just too much control and not a bunch of company-driven shit (See: Ads in your start menu? WTF kind of dystopian universe are you accepting?) with Linux distros.




  • All too much of OS config, IT work, and troubleshooting is a combination of reading docs, trying things, and plenty of online searches. The big missing piece is motivation. That's why I learned as a kid. It was all about building systems to play games.

    For your kids, a combination of showing the basics, how to find out how to fix things, giving them agency to modify the OS (assume you'll need to reinstall sometime), and a purpose could get them going. Not everyone find the motivation and interest, but kids are often more able to invest and explore than we give them credit for. I found my son (at age 13) at installed the proprietary NVidia driver for his laptop without my knowing. He just started following tutorials until it worked. Proud dad moment, time for ice cream, and then he went back to playing games with his buddies.


  • I just started them on Linux machines from the get go. The same reason I got good at 3.1/95/98 was to setup games, filesharing, and getting hardware to work for better games. Even with Steam, there's always some work to handle oddities. The kids are rapidly becoming reasonable basic admins the same way I did. Whether they decide to go further and learn more will be up to them.