sylver_dragon

Why do you believe life has meaning?

I personally don’t believe life has any meaning, other than the one you choose for your own life. It’s rather terrifying and freeing at the same time. If there is no meaning, and if there is nothing else, no higher power, then this is it. You get the time you get, running around as self aware stardust, and then it ends. Everything that is “you” flips off one day and there is nothing but oblivion as the stardust you were slow seeps away. But, that also means that you don’t have to live up to anyone else’s idea of what your life should be. You can make your own path, your own meaning, and fuck the people in funny hats who try to tell you otherwise. You are you and no one else gets to define what that is.

I was pondering why people fight so hard to beat diseases and live a few more years. What are they planning to do? Why exert effort just to be here longer when you don’t have a reason?

If this is all there is, if oblivion is on the other side of the door, I’ll scrabble for every day existing that I can get, thank you very much. Sure, I have my own beliefs and things I would willingly accept oblivion for. But, if those aren’t on the table, I’m gonna keep on existing as long as I can. It’s one of the few things I’m pretty good at.

This is basically me every night. Unless I go to bed at 3am, I usually toss and turn for an hour or more. So, I listen to audiobooks. Nothing heavy, usually just sci-fi or fantasy. Basically cotton-candy for the mind. Unless I have a good lecture going, the Great Courses stuff is soothing. But, that usually distracts me enough that I finally fall asleep. I use a single ear bud in my right ear and set a sleep timer so that the book shuts off after a reasonable time. That usually gets me close enough to sleeping that I can finally get the rest of the way.

The only downside to this plan, is when you get a really good book, with a good reader and you start getting towards the end of the book. The temptation to go just one more chapter is hard to resist.

It’s such a strange concept. “Here kid, eat this food you hate or I’m going to starve you!” You wouldn’t do this to an adult, and we’d all hate to be in the position of having food we hate force on us. So why do we do it to our kids? Sure, maybe we need them to eat something other than hot dogs and candy; but, we can do better than just, “this is why I bought so you will eat it!”

Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme with a really long time horizon. In a way, any fiat currency kinda is as well. The difference is that a government backed fiat currency like the US Dollar is backed by the US Government saying “you will accept the USD, or else”. That backing keeps the game running. Bitcoin has nothing like that. The only reason it keeps going is because of speculation, money laundering and the purchase of black market goods.

So, as long as you can go buy drugs or move money across borders with Bitcoin, it will have value. As long as it has value, some folks will speculate on it. That can keep prices up, right up until it doesn’t. So, as is always the case for speculative assets, caveat emptor.

I happen to be a prime example of how bad US Rail is this week. I’m taking my son from near Fredericksburg (the real one), up to Ballston for a summer camp. We have a couple options:

1. Drive

• Distance: ~70 miles one way, ~140 round trip
• Time: 1 hour and 45 minutes one way, with traffic. ~3.5 hours round trip.
• Cost:
  • 4 gallons (US) of gas @ $3.50/gal: $14
  • Wear and tear: estimate at 0.5 gas cost: $7
  • Parking: $11
  • Total: $32/day

2. Virginia Railway Express (VRE) and Washington Area Metro (WMATA)

• Distance: N/A
• Time:
  • Drive to Fredericksburg station: 20 minutes
  • VRE (Fredericksburg to L’Enfant station) - 1 hour 20 minutes
  • WMATA (L’Enfant to Ballston) - 20 minutes
  • Total: 2 hours one way, 4 hours round trip
• Cost:
  • Drive: we’ll just ignore this, it’s close enough to zero.
  • VRE: $23.56/person * 2 people: $47.12
  • WMATA: $3.45/person * 2 people: $6.90
  • Total: $54.02/day

So, for the low, low cost of about 1.68 times the cost of driving, we can take slightly longer to get to our destination and have zero control over our schedule, which makes the actual time devoted to travel considerably longer. We tried the public transit route last year, and it meant leaving earlier in the morning (about 30 minutes) to catch a train to get us there on time, and getting us home around 45 minutes later. And this is right around the US Capitol, which has some of the better transit options. Needless to say, we’re driving this year.

I really want to be able to take transit, but it’s basically dead in the US. Earlier this year, I needed to go to Boston for work. Catching a train from Washington, DC to Boston meant an 7 hour train ride (using the “high speed” Acela line) at ~$500 round trip. Flying was 1.5 hours and cost ~$300 round trip. Wanna guess which option I used?

Basically, all of the incentives are stacked against transit options in the US. Except within certain metro areas, driving or flying is always cheaper and faster. Yes, inside those metro areas, public transit can be great. I used to work in Washington, DC and used the VRE I mentioned earlier to get there and then WMATA or the Capital BikeShare to get to my office. That was great, since I didn’t have to drive into DC every day, which sucks big donkey balls. But it probably wasn’t cost effective and wasn’t really time efficient either.

Valheim.

Mistlands - Not because “whaaa, Mistalnds hard”, but because the whole area is built around verticality and the game engine most certainly is not. Combat is Valheim is generally pretty good, but after a reasonable amount of playtime, you will experience the frustration of swinging under/over enemies, because of minor variations in terrain height. Mistlands dials this problem up to 11, with the added bonus of enemies which specifically take advantage of this problem.

The Mistlands also turns exploration into a boring, grindy chore. The shorelines are a nightmare to sail around and even with the wisp, the mist is always too close to deal with said shorelines. So, you’re hoofing it through terrain which is designed to be difficult to navigate and move across. The feather cape helps, a bit. But, you’re still going to spend way too long faffing about, jumping up one side of a ridge and floating down the other, only to find that you’re in a gully with nothing useful and need to jump up the other side. Seeing dungeon entrances at any range is impossible. Enemies regularly pop out of nowhere and you’re forced into dealing with the combat verticality problems.

I’ll also throw a bit of shade at “Refined Eitr” as a resource, though I think the problem is less the resource and more the grind to get the parts for it. To start with, you need to make a Black Forge, to make that you need Black Cores, to get Black Cores, you need to spend hours in the mists hoping to stumble across one or more dungeons to get the cores. And inside the dungeons, expect lots of combat where the verticality problem is on prominent display. Now that you have the Black Table, you get to make the Eitr Refinery, which requires more Black Cores. Hope you enjoyed getting them the first time! Ok great, more cores obtained, time to go stumbling about again looking for Soft Tissue. With any luck, you’ve been mining (or at least marking) nodes along the way. Though, expect to spend more time lost in the Mists, you need a shit ton of Soft Tissue. Thankfully, this is a resource you can take through a portal, so that’s nice.

And finally, you get to raid Dverger towns for a required material to extract sap, a Sap Extractor. “What about trade? Vikings were well know traders”, you ask. Nope, fuck trade, all that gold you’ve been collecting, go spend it on some clothes which you will never actually use. You want a Sap Extractor, put on your killing pants and get raiding. Ok fine, we have our Sap Extractor covered in Dverger gore. And that gets us to the least horrible part of our Refined Eitr. Sap extraction is not terrible, find a spot with several roots in close proximity and just rotate a few extractors through them.

Right let’s get our Eitr Refinery built…and why the fuck is one of the input ports on the top? Ok whatever, I’ll build some stairs and…why the fuck is this thing tossing off damaging sparks? Yes, I know you can wrap it in iron bars, but seriously what the fuck? Why is this even a game mechanic? It’s really the perfect metaphor for all of the Mistlands. It’s needlessly annoying and doesn’t really provide anything positive for gameplay or fun. Just another pointless grind tossed in because, “players like hard things, right?”

First question which popped into my mind was, “Will they force Defender out as well?”
Or, is Microsoft about to abuse it’s position to stifle competition? Again.

do anticheat count as antivirus?

No. But, from the article:

Microsoft has been speaking with game developers about how to reduce the amount of kernel usage

The CrowdStrike fiasco was finally enough for Microsoft to look at forcing drivers out of the kernel. This is absolutely a good thing and will hopefully lead to a more stable Windows.

If you care about your privacy, don’t use products from a company whose entire business model is built on invading your privacy.

That’s the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. And for as much as it is a foundational document of the US, it’s also not a legal document.

Violence is always a bad option. Sometimes however, it’s the least bad of the bad options. And knowing when that point has been reached is incredibly hard, and often misjudged.

Reminds me of the tech site from long ago, Experts Exchange. Their website was originally expertsexchange[.]com, and it showed in in google searches fairly regularly (they actually had some reasonable content at the start). Eventually, they added a hyphen.

Not a specific word or phrase, but Google Dorking is useful for limiting down search results. Just the basics of putting things in double quotes (e.g. “Find this exact text”) and negating words/phrases (e.g. -NotThis) can go a long way in refining search results. The “filetype:” modifier is much less useful than it was a decade or two ago, as SEO assholes have gotten wise to it and so include tags to show up on results using it. The “site:” keyword can be really handy, when you are pretty sure what you want is on a specific site/domain. Or, if you are trawling a website for specific information. You can also negate the “site:” keyword. So, you can add something like “-site:expertsexchange.com” to a search and get rid of useless advertising sites.

No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it.

While I’m all for fresh ideas, one of the advantages to sticking with well known naming is that folks will often look for those things and might end up missing the community, if the name isn’t obvious and easily searchable. While “LFG” does imply that one is looking for a group, rather than maybe just a single other person, it also has a very long history in gaming and is a well known acronym. I suspect a lot of folks are going to specifically look for that acronym when starting their search. So, I’d argue with sticking with that classic.

That said, it is your community and you should build the identity you want to build. So, don’t let some old curmudgeon like me push you away from doing something that interests you.

do any of you hate how self-hosting services like photo- or document-management systems, or even a simple rss tool, forces you to sort your stuff out, and put your decades old files in order?!

What is this “sort” thing you speak of? I don’t sort anything, I have NextCloud syncing my entire photos, videos and documents folders and they are just as messy as ever. Granted, I do go through my photos and videos once a year and dump them in a folder named for the year they were taken. Occasionally, I’ll go hog wild and try to sort some of a year’s photos/videos into folders named after events. Though, that hasn’t happened in a number of years. I setup NextCloud so I could have everything synced to my own server and just forget, not have to deal with labeling my data.

As for bookmarks. I already keep those in folders; but, I don’t sync those. I use my desktop far more than I use my phone for web browsing. And the types of things I use my phone for (mostly recipes), I just keep bookmarked there.

The first issue with running a coin miner is using company resources for your own profit. Your own system, using your own electricity, go for it. Running it on a company owned laptop, while at a company building, burning electricity the company is paying for. Ya, that starts to get uncomfortably close to fraud or theft. There is also that whole, “running unauthorized software on a company system, doing who knows what else in the background.” There is a very real possibility that the coin miner has unknown vulnerabilities which could allow remote code execution; or, just outright be malicious and contain a remote access trojan. Maybe he was smart enough to audit all the code it was using and be very sure that’s not the case. More likely, he just grabbed a random implementation of XMRIG, put his wallet in the config file and ran it. Either way, he also made a point of refusing to remove it, so we escalated up to management. With the recent ransomware outbreak having been in the multi-million dollar (possibly low tens of millions) damage range, refusing to remove unauthorized software went over about as well as a lead balloon. There may have been other factors at play; but, the unauthorized software and being a dick about removing it was what got him out the door.

If you spin it up, fucking own it. When you’re done with it, shut it down. I have long lost count of the number of times I’ve reached out to a team to ask about the coin miner they are running on some random EC2 instance only to find out that some jackass spun it up for a test, gave it a public IP, set the VPC to allow any inbound traffic, installed all kinds of random crap and then never updated it. Nor did it get shutdown when the test ended. So, a year and a half later, when the software was woefully out of date, someone hacked it and spun up a coin miner. Oh, and the jackass who set it up didn’t bother to enable logging or security monitoring. But, they sure as hell needed the ability to spin stuff up on their own. Because working with IT to get it done right would be too hard for their fragile little ego.

You joke, but I’ve actually been responsible for a coder getting shown the door for running a coin miner on his work laptop.

In his defense, cyber security at that company was crap for a long time. After a ransomware outbreak, they started paying attention and brought some folks like myself in to start digging out. This guy missed the easy out of, “hey that’s not mine!” The logs we had were spotty enough that we would have just nuked the laptop and moved on. But no, he had to fight us and insist that he should be allowed to run a coin miner on his work laptop. Management was not amused.

With a long, strong, flexible tongue and a reputation for eating things, one of those collaborations basically writes itself.

I was talking about his mechanics in Brawl Stars, what were you thinking about, sicko?