th3raid0r

joined 1 year ago
[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Even on Windows, Proton drive is hot garbage. It never syncs my files correctly. Has a tendency to leave half encrypted uploads just lying around. Eating up desk space.

Don't even get me started on how long it takes to upload anything. Got a 1 GB file? Good luck!

And that's before getting into the fact that it's proton's third product. It was announced in 2019. 5 years and they still don't have proton drive as a working product.

Another gripe I have is that the Linux VPN client still doesn't support wireguard. Sure, you can download wireguard configuration files. And they work just fine. But changing servers is a pain in the ass because of it.

It's made me seriously consider dropping my visionary plan and moving to a more competent provider.

That being said, proton mail has been fantastic. And I have a ton of domains on it. So it would be a pain to move. I guess I'm just in a stalemate.

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 4 points 2 months ago

Oh yes, totally understood. I've seen families destroyed from sports gambling and other, less boisterous forms of it.

If I like anything, it's scratchers and it's because they're soooooo satisfying to "play". But it's only something I indulge in occasionally.

Anyways, I tried to get into MMO's back in the early days with all my friends. I tired of it fairly quickly. I guess the novelty seeking part of my brain overwhelmingly rejects typical "gambling" mechanics. Loot boxes don't do anything for me and never have.

More recently I've grown completely frustrated with franchises like Forza Horizon and their little slot machine / skinner box mechanic. I love racing games, but it made me stop playing.

I can be addicted to things, but it just isn't gambling for me somehow.

I do resent MMO's for destroying so many of my friend's lives though. Weird to lose people to that ecosystem, it's the video game equivalent to losing someone to an MLM.

Also fuuuuuck, MLMs, almost did the "vector marketing" (cutco cutlery) and "rainbow vacuum" thing - the only thing that saved me was that Youtube had existed for like 5 years by then and there was enough people out there with their stories.

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I never understood this one. I have ADHD and autism and I find gambling boring as hell. With maybe the exception of blackjack. Where my autistic brain tries to count cards.

I remember the day I turned 21. I decided to try out a casino. I spent $50 there and promptly left. Maybe I just lucked out and they didn't hook me with an easy win early on?

I'd much rather spend $50 on a video game that I can entertain myself with for hours.

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 4 points 2 months ago

One unique tip that I have is to go to a CBD/Hemp store and snag some CBD heavy strains to mix in with your normal bud. Making sure to increase the % of CBD each time you grind.

It might not help immediately, since CBD is supposed to be a calming substance, not a stimulant. But quitting smoking is a whole lot easier once you are mostly on the CBD stuff.

Definitely avoid the CBG heavy hemp as that'll just give you the gnarliest munchies you'll ever have in your life. Some people swear it's "smart weed" - but for me I can't think straight when munchies are knocking.

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 3 points 2 months ago

I'm really surprised no one mentioned Terra Invicta!

Basically if the Three Body Problem series was a Grand strategy game.

In terms of grand strategy it is quite grand. So massive and complex that even 100 hours in, I haven't completed a game.

That being said, it's so addicting. I haven't really played any other Sci-Fi games where you can take over multiple countries on Earth, take over other bodies in the solar system, and field space Navy to defend the planet.

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Well, seeing that Insurgency: Sandstorm was on a sale, I just picked it up for him (and myself). Seems to have a lot in the map making scene, and that's a really important factor for him.

It also helps that the prior Insurgency game has the most hours on his profile, by far. Gave me a good hint that he should enjoy this one.

Thanks so much!

EDIT: My dad just got back to me, and loves the gift. Apparently that's where most of his online buddies went and still are. Nailed it!

 

As in title, my father is an American nomad, and he just recently got a spot with good internet signal for a few months.

He hasn't really played in years, and the last game he really enjoyed was Warface and Novalogic's Joint Operations: Combined Arms.

There is a bit of a twist though, his vision certainly isn't what it used to be, so whatever game I suggest needs accessibility options galore.

I found a really good "singleplayer only" experience in Ravenfield and the style lends itself very well to my father's limited vision.

Is there something like Ravenfield but with a well supported online component? Perhaps Battlebit: Remastered is pretty close?

EDIT: I suppose the genre is better described a "mil-sim" than "tactical shooter".

UPDATE: Someone recommended the latest Insurgency game. After realizing my father had over 1K hours in the previous Insurgency game I realized that this was the game to get. Turns out it was a good choice! That's where most of my father's online buddies ended up! Thanks all! Feel free to keep recommending things, but we already seem to have a winner!

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 31 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I understand the sentiment... But... This is a terribly reasoned and researched article. We only need to look at the NASA to see how this is flawed.

Blown Capacitors/Resistors, Solder failing over time and through various conditions, failing RAM/ROM/NAND chips. Just because the technology has less "moving parts" doesn't mean its any less susceptible to environmental and age based degradation. And we only get around those challenges by necessity and really smart engineers.

The article uses an example of a 2014 Model S - but I don't think it's fair to conflate 2 Million Kilometers in the span of 10 years, vs the same distance in the span of the quoted 74 years. It's just not the same. Time brings seasonal changes which happen regardless if you drive the vehicle or not. Further, in many cases, the car computers never completely turn off, meaning that these computers are running 24/7/365. Not to mention how Tesla's in general have poor reliability as tracked by multiple third parties.

Perhaps if there was an easy-access panel that allowed replacement of 90% of the car's electronics through standardized cards, that would go a long way to realizing a "Buy it for Life" vehicle. Assuming that we can just build 80 year, "all-condition" capacitors, resistors, and other components isn't realistic or scalable.

Whats weird is that they seem to concede the repairability aspect at the end, without any thought whatsoever as to how that impacts reliability.

In Conclusion: A poor article, with a surface level view of reliability, using bad examples (One person's Tesla) to prop up a narrative that EVs - as they exist - could last forever if companies wanted.

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 17 points 3 months ago (21 children)

Well that's pretty compelling!

Ever since the failure of Windows mixed reality, there hasn't been many non-Meta HMD's worth buying. At least with inside out tracking.

Maybe this will finally pressure Valve to lower the price on the venerable Index? Probably not. But one can hope!

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 5 points 4 months ago

I'm running a Steam OS like experience on my Lenovo Legion Go. Not quite a steam deck, but very similar.

You should be able to use the heroic launcher. And you should be able to install it as a flat pack or a snap. That will make your GOG games as easy to download and install as a steam game. If I recall correctly, it even automatically adds entries for steam.

I regularly play Bomb Rush Cyberfunk on this device using the GOG edition.

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Huh, now that's a classic I never thought would get a remaster/re-release! I played this a ton when I was a little kid in the 90s on my Sega Genesis.

Though I'll probably stick to purchasing on Steam. I'm steering clear of Nintendo where possible.

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 2 points 5 months ago

I normally would, but my wife has the same problem and she's done that 3 times in the last 6 months. In fact, her problem became MUCH worse because the "clean slate" was far more impressionable. She'd search up beauty routines, only to find that Youtube thinks she now wants to see "popping" videos, even though she's now searching for dinner recipes.

So yeah, I saw her experience and decided "no thanks".

To be fair, MOST of YouTube I watched can be found on Nebula and Floatplane, both of which will likely not have this issue since it's not a user-content platform. Not to mention, the creators likely make more from those platforms anyways.

YouTube is basically unavoidable though, so now I just view everything through a piped instance if I absolutely need something that can only be found there.

[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 12 points 5 months ago (5 children)

I used to subscribe to YouTube premium as of just a few days ago. Even without the ads. There was something very seriously wrong with the suggestion algorithm.

I was getting cartel violence videos, and dead animal videos. Never watched one before in my life. Yet. YouTube seems to think that I should want to watch this crock of shit. This started coming up about 6 months ago. Until now I've been reporting each video as they come up. But that doesn't seem to help at all.

At this point I think YouTube is a danger to society - if it's recommending cartel violence videos to me unsolicited, what are they suggesting to my nieces?

I have completely nuked it from my life. Almost all of the YouTubers I like are on Nebula or Floatplane so it doesn't feel like I'm missing much.

 

Obviously this is still a Pixel issue - but at least I can connect to my home Wifi again.

I previously posted saying that Wifi was broken in general, but I mistook my ongoing Xfinity outage as being unable to connect to any wifi. Thus I removed the post.

When the outage ended, I could connect to some other networks and couldn't figure out why.

It wasn't until after a painful factory reset process that I tried going from WPA3/WPA2 mode to just WPA2 on both of my APs and suddenly everything is able to connect again.

It seems that the recent OTA update borked WPA3-Personal in a way that doesn't allow it to navigate the "compatibility mode" of WPA3/WPA2 either.

Edit - Looks like this might even be something Verizon specific - UQ1A-20231205.015.A1

Edit2 - Also mine is a Pixel 7 Pro - a Pixel 6 Pro user reports no such issue - YMMV.

 

Other Arch Flavors I've tried (some are no longer with us) include:

  • ArchBang
  • EndeavourOS
  • Manjaro
  • Chakra

So with that out of the way, I've found my Garuda experience incredibly painful. From messy repositories (Chaotic-AUR plus their own stuff), to an overly involved upgrade process (when using the helper) - the distro screams of a team that has no freakin' clue how to maintain an actual distribution.

It's basically Arch on hard mode with so many settings rolled into their own packages which need to be removed before customization.

Then we get to the purported performance enhancements and, honestly, this is the worst performing distro I've ever used, by multiple miles. I'm not sure if its the scheduler settings, or something with the zram settings - but this distro hitches and hangs constantly. (5950x, 64GB of Ram, Samsung 980 Pro drives, NVIDIA RTX 3080Ti - NOT a weak machine by any standards)

I'd normally chalk it up to compositor issues on Wayland (yes, I prefer Wayland and it works fine for most Arch derivitaves even with Nvidia). However the performance issues even crop up on basic terminal commands on a TTY with lots of weird hangs and lags.

The ONLY thing that was easier on this distro was installing the various Proton GE builds and other specialty stuff found in the Chaotic-AUR. But given the above, it's definitely not worth it when one can configure an Arch box to do the same things without all of the problems.

Perhaps I'm not doing something right? Given all the praise for this distro, perhaps it shouldn't perform like this?

To be completely and utterly clear - I'm an advanced user trying out these distros for fun and discovery. I can indeed "just use a different distro" but wanted to give this one a fair shake before moving on.

 

A bit more context there since you might wonder why customers can cause Sev1's.

Well, I work for a Database Technology company and we provide a managed service offering. This managed service offering has SLA's that essentially enforce a 5 minute response time for any "urgent" issue.

Well, a common urgent issue is that the customer suddenly wants to load in a bunch of new data without informing us which causes the cluster to stop accepting write loads.

It's to the point where most if not all urgent pages result in some form of scaling of the cluster.

Since this is a customer driven behavior, there is no real ability to plan for it - and since these particular customers have special requirements (and thus, less ability to automate scaling operations), I'm unsure if there is any recourse here.

It's to the point that it doesn't even feel like an SRE team anymore - we should just instead be called "On-demand scaling agents". Since we're constantly trying to scale ahead of our customers.

All in all, I'm starting to feel like this is a management/sales level issue that I cannot possibly address. If we're selling this managed service offering as essentially "magic" that can be scaled whenever they need then it seems like we're being setup for failure at the organizational level. Not to mention, not being smart about costs behind scaling and factoring that into these contracts.

So, fellow SRE's have you had to have this conversation with a larger org? What works for something like this? What doesn't? Should I just seek greener pastures at this point?

P.S. - Posted c/Programming due to lack of a c/SRE

 

Not much to say quite yet, but the book is REALLY nice and compliments the offset print version of Stars Without Number quite nicely.

 

Hi All,

For those of you using FoundryVTT, here's the latest pre-release of my fork of PepjinMC's FoundryVTT-AI-Description-Generator.

For those who haven't heard of it, it's a neat module that allows users in your FoundryVTT instance to get quick descriptions of characters, items, and actions with a single button click. Initially it only supported the D&D system, but my fork extends it to work with any system, provided you know the mappings.

For D&D mappings see the settings on my merge-back branch - https://github.com/th3raid0r/FoundryVTT-AI-Description-Generator/blob/dnd-mergeback/scripts/settings.js

For other mappings, you'll likely need to poke around the data yourself and update things manually. If you do this, please send me your system and mappings so I can begin to create a library for less technical folks.

Hope it's useful to some GM's out there! I use it almost every session!

 

No Idea if this will be a permanent coupon link, but figured I should share here.

source

 

I just read through all your stickies and I'm a HUGE fan!

I'm one of the main moderators for /r/TraumaAndPolitics - a small sub, but one that was aiming for a conception of community that was trauma informed, patient, and made nice people want to stick around. I also sought to have those conversations about how Politics and Trauma interrelate and honestly, this place is emblematic of what happens when leaders make trauma informed decisions about moderation and community building. Bravo!

Anyways:

As an admin of a virtual mirror of a real community (the city of Tucson) I was hoping to perhaps get some additional context for certain blocked sites - mostly so I know what the threat to the community was and can respond to it if I choose NOT to block it. The list that appears on the instance is great! And I definitely know why some communities are on there, but some others I haven't heard about and can only guess as to the reason for the block.

Thanks in advance for any intel! Hopefully with inspiration from y'all and a little help we can make tucson.social a thriving fediverse instance for a local community in a way that actually resembles a community!

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