The open source stuff aren’t as polished but they don’t want me dead so I guess that’s an easy decision to stop looking at Prusas for me.

For the future: File Lockpick, from PowerToys. The only thing the Windows product managers haven’t ruined, and only because it’s on Microsoft’s GitHub and not built into the OS. Or in Winget, since this is Lemmy.

You can just right click the drive that won’t eject or the file that won’t cut and it’ll list everything that had a handle open, without digging through the SysInternals programs.

I wonder where my computing would be if I spent all this time scaling the Linux learning curve instead of the Windows one. Probably more friction at my work-issued Windows machine. Probably increasingly many hours saved on “fixing” every successive Windows install.

For me it ends up being SpaceSniffer a solid 20% of the time.

For what it’s worth Windows 10 is/was perfectly usable after setting it up properly. A bit of customization needed but nothing crazy. Honestly I liked the OS and its design, it felt very clean and utility oriented.

I’ve set up a new Windows 11 install from scratch this past month and it has been a real pulling-teeth experience. It’s not completely unfixable (yet) but even the annoyances that are not sinister are perplexing. There’s a new context menu that has a cut down layout and takes a few milliseconds to load - I get the design decision to keep it short, and have a button for more options, but it lags - so I’m out. It’s just a little hidden config to automatically skip to the full (more cluttered but no lag) menu (which you could do by holding shift every single time). There’s a few dozen little annoyances like that. A few are bigger than others, like the need to drive Copilot out to the desert and double tap it in the head unceremoniously. They’ve put it in Paint. They’ve put it in fucking Notepad.

That’s not even getting into how desperately they want every user signing away the rights to their bone marrow to the Microsoft Corporation. The computer I’ve set up is more or less where I want it to be, but I’m wary of things breaking with an update.

I’m not big on quotes but I’ve been coming back to Ed Zitron’s words a lot lately:

I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer.

I find it funny how the tables turned. Used to be that Linux was the one that needed unintuitive setup and Windows was the one that just worked. I don’t think I’ve used a single Linux image that didn’t just drop me into a desktop environment no questions asked upon boot, and that’s a world away from the awful, awful new Windows experience. Unless Microsoft conspires to make the next decade of Linux hardware drivers absolutely abhorrent, I think this will have to be my last Windows machine. That or the entire executive suite of Microsoft’s OS division has an epiphany about not wanting to spend eternity in hell.

For all the Just Use Linux people: I’ve got more machines running Linux in my house than Windows. I’ll get there, Microsoft is just doing everything they can to push everyone off their OS.

IIRC I played it a little and it was just mobile microtransaction hell after a certain point, no?

At least to me, Overwolf is the third or fourth iteration, following acquisitions, buyouts, restructurings, etc. The original FTB launcher worked perfectly fine. It’s mostly just obnoxious now and I make sure not to have it running in the background. No direct rent-seeking behavior just yet, I don’t have an account on there and it’s not a problem.

Right now I have it on my computer just use it to update packs that are only available there and then yoink them straight into MultiMC.

AFAIK it is owned by Curse and I guess those guys make most of their money from those godawful wikis and their ads.

I thought I’d check this before posting it, and it turns out it’s the other way around. Overwolf bought Curse. Worse, Overwolf is a company based out of Tal Abib… that’s two discoveries in one day. I was looking into getting a CaribouMini until I learned where that comes from. Less than two hundred kilometers away from me as the missile crow flies (and sadly, has flown). Great. Fucking great.

The shitty thing is that a lot of cool pack creators only publish through Overwolf, so I don’t want to delete it just yet, but I don’t like this at all. At best a minor security risk, at worst I don’t even want to know. I just thought it was just some shitty ad company’s Curse buyout as a billboard for more ads. For all the issues I might have with Nexus Mods, I don’t think they’re quite this bad. Concerning that this is the de facto standard repository of MC mods.

I think I should have been more clear, this is exactly what I’m asking about. I’m somewhat surprised by the reaction this post got, this seems like a very normal thing to want to host.

Doesn’t help that some people here are replying as if I was asking to locally host the “trick” that is feeding a chatbot text and asking it whether it’s machine-generated. Ideally the software I think I’m looking for would be something that has a bank of LLM models and can kind of do some sort of statistical magic to see how likely a block of tokens is to be generated by them. Would probably need to have quantized models just to make it run at a reasonable speed. So it would, for example, feed the first x tokens in, take stock of how the probability table looks for the next token, compare it to the actual next token in the block, and so on.

Maybe this is already a thing and I just don’t know the jargon for it. I’m pretty sure I’m more informed about how these transformer algorithms work than the average user of them, but only just.

I have a whole ass case of assorted fine Lebanese wine for Natenyahu, stashed away in my family’s old home in the mountains.

Here’s hoping he doesn’t get to it before I do.

I feel like the dialogue in the last panel is unnecessary.

It’s the most popular sporting event on the planet in a country with 300 million people, this is nothing like the Club World Cup that was held this year. The lack of tourists might not be a problem, save for maybe atmosphere.

This chart, with the huge ticket prices, is why the US was chosen.

DankPods my beloved as well. He’s not very technical with software so it’s quite interesting to hear him talk about it.

Wouldn’t even call it a pun, as someone pointed out already. I’m going to sacrifice the joke in the name of explaining it.

This meme says Morning of Strawberries (صباح الفراولة) which is both clunky (Arabic’s got a poetic quality and these two words put together just intuitively do not work that way. It has the meter of a punchline if that makes sense) and silly, but with the textured elephant and the 13x12 resolution as you can probably guess it’s just a surreal meme.

But now you know why it’s a surreal meme.

Come back next week for the much less wholesome next episode of Arabic forwards from Arabic grandma: videos alleging the Jews invented homosexuality, cancer, and sex

Well, eating > restaurants > a list with potential promoted entries.

I really don’t think the intention of integrating this “intelligence” into Facebook is explicitly to make us dumber. I think the only real purpose is to supercharge marketing. Eroding the mental capacity of functional human beings is just a happy little accident.

I have a special bottle of cognac for Kissinger, but I was abroad for work when he returned whence he came so I didn’t get to enjoy the occasion. I haven’t opened it yet given how shit the situation everywhere is, but maybe celebrating small wins is vital even when important stuff is happening.

I was taken aback when I heard someone I expected better from use “matrix”, although it was used in a “some people call it x” context and not the regular one dripping with… let’s call it baggage.

Outhouse Perilous is an absolutely spectacular username.

This is the translation they forced me to memorize at gunpoint at Liberal Arts University of Woke:

I’ve read the entire profile and it seems to me more like satire than an actual serious summary (quite some hyperbole in there), tho it’s worrying that your entire reddit history can be analyzed so quickly.

Punched in my old profile. I don’t think any of the actual pieces of info it are inaccurate, but the dull, gummy gleam of “quirky” corpo speak that LLMs love to imprint on all of their output makes it much yuckier for me. The roast section is especially silly, my commenting ramped up before the API broke in 2019-2022 during a genuine phase of societal chaos in my home country and this tool makes it sound like my exasperated rants over my society beginning to crumble are obscure rants about modern Star Wars.

I’m not as familiar as many people now with LLM tone, and more precisely tonal dissonance, so I guess this is a lesson. But I can’t say I enjoyed that.

I did notice the same title since they were near each other on my front page. But it does look like you’re posting this uncritically, even with the context. It looks less like you’re showing us something relevant but tasteless to gawk at the state of mainstream online “content” and more like you want to laugh at “annoying fat bitches maaaaan” (who are actually doing their friend a favor seeing what the OOP is going for).

Childish misogyny is endemic on most online platforms now, none of us here want to see this shit. It’s not people being dumb.

I’ve posted bad memes in comments I don’t like before to provide context.

You could have gone with something like “oh this is much better than the rancid original: rancidoriginal.png”

I think that’s a Y510p. This was the machine that made me think Lenovo knew what they were doing and were the true successors to IBM, for laptops at least.

This machine was released right before the gaming laptop age really kicked off, so its paltry GT750(M! Sometimes two of them) was about as good as it got outside of a sketchy DTR from a company you’ve never heard of. Only a few years later did the standard go way up for gaming laptop performance, with everyone and their dog getting an Nvidia 1050/1060/1070 machine.

But I really liked the Y500/Y510. Serious design that made it look like a thick business laptop with polished black surfaces and cool red key edges vs gaudy RGB sludge with LOOK AT ME I AM EPICLY GAMERING all over it. I kind of wish they kept this design style.

Oh well. Tongfang has my back now.

I knew of Tunnet, but this looks cool. I wonder if it’s at all helpful for getting to grips with some networking intuition, I always feel behind when it comes to anything networking related.