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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • “Nobody” probably isn’t literal here, but I imagine some manager scheduling a meeting where they want a report on the game’s performance and feedback during the beta. Some higher up is going to sit in for the first few minutes for the KPI summary.

    The sweating analyst jokes about the heat in the room, the higher up dryly remarks that the AC seems to be working just fine. The presentation starts, the analyst grasping for some more weasel words and void sentences to stall with before finally switching to the second slide, captioned “Player count”. It’s a big, fat 0.

    They stammer their way through half a sentence of trying to describe this zero, then fall silent, staring at their shoes. The game dev lead has a thousand yard stare. The product owner is trying to maintain composure.

    The uncomfortable silence is finally broken by the manager, getting up to leave: “I think we’re done here.” There is an odd sense of foreboding, that “here” might not just mean the meeting. The analyst silently proceeds to the next slide, showing the current player count over time in a line chart.



  • Linux is free and open source software ecosystem. It’s like handing people free brushes, canvases and paints - sure, removing the financial hurdles may enable talents otherwise unable to afford indulging their artistic streak, but you also can’t really prevent anyone from painting awful bullshit. Best you can do is not give them attention or a platform to advertise their stuff on.

    That’s the price of freedom: It also extends to assholes. We can’t start walling off Linux, so the best we can do is individually wall them off from our own life and hope enough other people around us do it too.


  • I’ll plug an interesting blog post on the topic of using chemical weapons. The post concerns itself mostly with lethal weapons, but I feel like some of the points apply here as well.

    The essence is that for modern military systems, mobility and the relative cost of manufacturing, storing and employing (lethal) chemical weapons compared to protective equipment render them much less valuable than conventional explosive munitions. They see usage mostly between weaker static armies, which lack the equipment, training or command doctrines for modern warfare.

    The banning of chemical weapons was done because they weren’t generally very useful for the modern systems of the superpowers at the time. Russia cracking them out again suggests they no longer have all the capabilities of a modern superpower. Which probably isn’t super new for most people, but might be worth spelling out anyway.








  • I studied CompSci, so a very technical field, and with one exception (Power BI), everything I used ran on Linux just as well. For my Thesis, I used TeXStudio. For normal writing or presentations, I just used LibreOffice. For calculations, I used Python. For collaborative document editing, we used Google Docs.

    Word of caution: LibreOffice supports the various formats of MS Office, but I’ve had issues the other way around, where a presentation I created in LO wouldn’t work in MSO. If you need to collab on files together, I’d recommend Google Docs. If it’s just you, I recommend sending PDF versions along with (or instead of) the original file, just to be sure.



  • AFAIK there is support for EAC in Proton now, as that was required for Elden Ring. But there probably is some work to do still on the devs’ part, and if they’re not willing to invest that time for what so far is still a niche…

    It’s a bit of a self-perpetuating problem, like all cases of platform inertia: People are reluctant to switch, so unless the draw to the alternative becomes strong enough, they’re more likely to stay. But for the alternative to become appealing, more people would need to switch.

    It’s the same reason many people aren’t leaving Twatter: If you want to reach many people, you’ll want to be in the place with many people.




  • Fuck me, I guess - All the fun I’ve had the last two years wasn’t actually real? I only thought I was having a good time? Why didn’t you tell me back then so I could have been appropriately miserable!

    I’ve got an RTX 3060 with a Ryzen 5 5600X, running Nobara as my sole OS and I’m playing plenty of games just fine. I can’t say that I’ve ever had to do any tinkering to get BG3 to run, and when I recently decided to replay AC Odyssey, it ran smoothly out of the box.

    Granted, sound issues can be annoying, but it’s not like there are no guides for setting up 5.1 with pulseaudio or pipewire. Yes, it’s some tinkering, and I agree that it would be nice if it ran out of the box.

    But if plenty of people around you have theirs working fine, calling them all delusional because yours doesn’t is kinda stupid.

    “Could it be that I’m doing something wrong? No, it’s the linux gamers that are wrong!”


  • You haven’t provided any info about your partition scheme for either drive, but I assume you’ve got your bootloader installed in an EFI partition in the newer drive. You will still have an EFI partition on the old drive created by the Ubuntu installer, so just be sure you know which bootloader you’re using.

    Yes, the new drive has a boot partition mounted to /boot/efi, according to the Disks utility.

    It’s not clear what issues you’re worried about, but if you’re nervous about breaking the Ubuntu installation[…]

    Actually, that’s a good point. I’m expecting to get rid of the installation anyway, so I don’t need to worry about breaking anything there.

    It’s not clear to me what the goal of option 3 is

    Same as option 2, avoiding breaking a system I’m getting rid of anyway.

    Thanks for pointing out the errors in my line of thought!


  • I feel like you are overthinking this

    Yes, most certainly, but given my own inexperience I figured I’d rather overthink than fuck up because I didn’t know about some detail.

    Take special attention to the /boot partition. I don’t know which drive the bootloader for your nobora os is installed. It may have been automatically put together with your Ubuntu to your HDD.

    Fairly sure the boot partition is on the new SSD, but I’ll check and leave it untouched if I’m not sure.

    Thanks for your advice!




  • I imagine the answer is “what’s the real world?”

    I’m being facetious. I don’t want to assume they all fit the stereotype of nerd that never leaves his room if he can help it.

    They can probably either mask their hatred well enough, or they’re in a place just as bigoted, which may have fostered their convictions in the first place. They go through their interactions with the real world seething with anger and bitterness, then seek relief in video games.

    At their heart, they’re no different from anyone else seeking to escape the unpleasant reality through some media - be that through building a peaceful farm, fighting powerful enemies, reading a gripping story or watching sports. They can’t actually fight the circumstances that cause their pain (or at least think so), so they flee instead.

    It’s reallly just the source of their pain that’s so much more toxic, which in turn leads to a toxic result that ends up poisoning their joy in life even more. Most likely, they’ve been fed that poison by someone exploiting their vulnerability and unhappiness by giving their aimless frustration a target, reassuring them that someone else is to blame for their misery. It didn’t lessen their misery, but at least it gave the question “why am I suffering?” a satisfying and concrete answer. “It’s not you. It’s not some random and unpredictable circumstance that you have no control over. It’s these people that you can do something about.”

    Except you can’t actually do anything about “these people”, but you can at least construct a fantasy of an ideal world without “these people”, where naturally you’re doing much better too. In the specific case of the toxic gamers, they’re looking to video games for manifestations of that world, for places they can immerse themselves in and be free from the troubles of the real world.

    If these games fail to sate that fantasy, to provide an environment they seek where they’re powerful and “safe” from all the things that make them upset, that rage is taken to the forums and echo chambers where they share their suffering with each other to ease and validate it. It’s one thing if there’s some niche indie game made by “these people” - they’re on the outskirts of the gaming world, you can easily ridicule or ignore them. It’s another thing when there’s a game placed front and center, getting all the attention and hype for a moment, and that game is full of things that hurt you.

    For a twisted comparison, imagine if a new game got all the hype and (positive) attention, despite being full of Nazis, presenting them as entirely normal or even good people. You’d (rightly) be upset too. The difference - aside from the subject - is that your upset lilely isn’t born from a stock of thoroughly curated hatred and anger. You’ll probably not muster the same rage as these people, because you don’t have it bottled up already.

    I say this because I’ve been a hateful person too once. Not as bad as some of these specimens, but bad enough to know the spiral and to guess how much unhappier I could have been, how much unhappier they must be. They’re victims turned abusers, and while that doesn’t excuse their behaviour, it may help us understand where it comes from and give us an idea of what to fight:

    Bigotry is born from misery seeking an outlet, fertilised by ignorance, nurtured by confirmation bias. The better our lives get, the less reason to look for someone to blame. The more we learn to think critically and question the lies we’re fed, the less that “someone” will be a convenient target keeping us in the spiral. The more we’re exposed to things that contradict our bias, the weaker it will get.

    The last bit is what broke me out of the loop, the second is what saw me crawl back up the spiral and unravel my convictions.

    Life’s still tough, but at least it has gotten a lot less hateful and miserable since I stopped feeding the hate and blaming others for my own deficiencies and started working on myself.