VinesNFluff

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[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

That specifically has actually not happened to me. Though I've seen people comment on it.

........... But.

One scenario I run into a lot is finding a result that would be useful...

.... But it depends on external links. And those links are dead. The internet is a perpetually on fire Library of Alexandria

[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 13 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Adding to what everyone else has said.

.... You know what helped me learn how to write (which I now do for a living)? Yes, talking in comment sections -- But specifically.

I spent a lot of time in fandom forums.

Why does this matter?

Well.

TV Show fandoms are very low-stakes, you know? If you're learning to swim you start at the kiddy pool, not the olympic one. So you can participate in discussions, make up headcanons, and learn how to express your ideas... And if you do get picked apart or something, even if you actually, genuinely, fucked up and were straight up wrong. It's... Y'know. It's just a TV show. So you can, in fact, let it go.

It's different from when you're talking about something serious, something important. If you're writing about something technical and you mess up, you can end up spreading misinformation. On a political discussion, being clear on what you mean is important because the stuff being talked about matters. Not so for a fandom.

Oh and -- Re-read what you wrote, and use that edit button if you catch something you missed.

[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 3 points 2 weeks ago

I make a point to just not open any thread that mentions US Politics.

[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 15 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

Internet search has gotten stupider

Used to be I could always find exactly what I wanted with a quick google

Now I usually have to go into the second page or change my terms a lot before getting there.

[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 1 points 2 weeks ago

Clairvoyance and kids shouldn't mix

There's that whole "children of Dune" book that tells us why.

[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

When it's not under threat of being crushed by an angry moon, Clock Town is a very nice place.

Lindblum from Final Fantasy 9 (roman numerals are for goobers)

I adore the concept of a Castle Town where the castle is so big it sorta consumes the entire town. And the whole steam-punk techno-fantasy vibe of the city is extremely pretty.

[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

If you specifically mean LLM/GenAI:

  • Some of my friends enjoy fucking around with those character AIs. I never got the appeal, even as an RP nerd, RPing is a social activity to me, and computers aren't people
  • I have seen funny memes be made with Image Generators -- And tbqh as long as you're not pretending that being an AI prompter makes you an "artist", by all means go crazy with generating AI images for your furry porn/DnD campaign/whatever
  • https://goblin.tools/ is a cool little thing for people as intensely autistic as I am, and it runs off AI stuff.
  • Voice Recognition/Dictation technology powered by AI is a lot better than its pre-AI sibling. I've been giving it a shot lately. It helps my arthritis-ridden hands.

If you mean anything that utilizes machine learning ("AI" is a buzzword), then "AI" technology has been used to help scientists and doctors do their jobs better since the mid 90s

[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 5 points 2 weeks ago

I wish it was socially acceptable to call people lazy for certain computer-related woes.

I often have to "rescue" my mother because her computer 'broke'. -- What is actually happening is that windows is doing the usual Windows thing of nagging you about updates/microsoft edge/whatever. It's a matter of reading what it's saying, but she just... Doesn't read the message or look for the button. This woman has a PhD. Like. She isn't stupid. She's incredibly smart, actually. But she just doesn't want to learn.

Like, the computer itself can tell you a lot of stuff. You just need to read and click around. But when it's a computer screen it's like some people develop selective blindness. I legitimately wonder if people who are 60+ have some eyesight thing going on where content displayed on a screen and specifically on a screen is unreadable to them. Because if anything is in a different place or it does something unexpected, they just lock up like a deer in the headlights instead of like. Reading what is on screen.

[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Mate

The fake ass AIs we have are straining the power grids of the entire world

AGI literally cannot hurt humanity because a minor brownout would kill it in its cradle.

[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 1 points 2 weeks ago

You mean the thinly veiled eugenics manifesto?

[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 1 points 2 weeks ago

Asshole (but left wing)

[–] VinesNFluff@pawb.social 21 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

People are commenting 'fates worse than death' and 'being made into a labrat by the 1%', but really, if you have infinite time to just do stuff and you can't be killed -- And you don't somehow squirrel your way into a position of power then what are you even doing with your time and immortality, oomfie?

The loneliness part is also questionable. I know OP said it's overly done, but I also think it's just wrong. If you're an adult you've had people in your life die before. It sucks. You miss them. But then you move on. And you meet other people. You'll still go ":(" when you think about the person and such... But life goes on.

And that's just life. It doesn't get any worse if you extend it longer -- If anything it gets better. You might have lost your beloved today, but you have another dozen lifetimes to heal your wounds and meet someone else and fall in love again and (...)

So here's some lower-stakes, frustrating inconveniences of being immortal:

  • Your favourite fashion? It's not just out of fashion. It's so out of fashion it is now considered 'historical costuming'. You can no longer find any articles like it at all. Because the only people even trying to recreate the techniques are costuming nerds and theater people who always exaggerate stuff
  • You got a song stuck in your head. It is either from before recording was invented, or any recordings of it that existed are too old to be reliably listenable. You have a song stuck in your head.
  • You used to really enjoy a job you did. That entire career path is now obsolete. As per the first paragraph of my post, if you're immortal you have probably snuck your way into the upper echelons of society at some point during your infinite time... But like. You're bored. You loved being a Court Jester, now there are no Court Jesters.
  • Actually tedium just in general. Sooner or later you'll run out of new things to try, because you'll have done everything that even remotely caught your eye already. So what the fuck will you do with your time? You'll eventually just get depressed and not do anything.
 
 

Count Regal Inkwell, the Lord Inquisitor, favoured by the Princess, leaned in for the kiss. For all the rewards which power netted him, it always came with equal if not greater amounts of stress: So much to worry about, so much to fear, so much at stake every day.

This was meant to be his comfort from the stresses of life, to be in the embrace of Mr. Fluffy Pillow, his Majordomo, the highest-ranking servant of his household, and his beloved, his precious, sweet fluffy boy.

And still, the noble worried. Always. He often joked that he wouldn't be himself if he didn't worry. It wasn't that he couldn't have the pegasus: Few would deny a powerful stallion such as him anything, let alone some common-born pegasus. It wasn't that he was a married stallion seeking comfort in the embrace of his servant, he was naught if not a dutiful husband, and his wife knew and did not mind the time he spent with the pegasus.

Rather, what worried him at times like these, always, was quite the opposite: How aware he was of the gulf there was between himself and the winged servant. In power, in age, in all things. It had been years, and still every night did he wonder if one day the other horseshoe would drop, if he'd find out the pegasus was merely following orders, doing his job in spite of himself. — He very genuinely loved the servant and wanted to see him happy. He would never, ever, forgive himself if it came to light that his beloved had given himself to him out of duty, and that he had essentially been forcing himself on the pegasus.

Still they kissed, even as the little pony in the lord-inquisitor's head reprimanded him for this great impropriety. Still they embraced in their secret little rendezvous.

Fluffy, for his part, thought of nothing, and worried about nothing: His master was a great stallion, as lovely on the inside as he was outside. He took great joy and pride in serving a stallion such as Lord Inkwell, and considered himself the luckiest colt alive, that he was also the target of his glorious liege's affections

Very self-indulgent piece I commissioned as an early birthday gift to myself <3 It shall have a less safe sequel, in time, but it should take a while.

 
 
 
 

Title. I dual-boot Windows and Linux. I always saw people making "WINDOWS DELETED MY LINUX BOOTLOADER OMGOMG" posts and it had never happened to me. Now, the opposite has happened. I switched from EndeavourOS to OpenSUSE and now my windows install is no longer selectable on boot.

I keep Windows in a separate drive entirely, so instead of using grub, I use the EFI's boot-select menu thingamafuck (look I don't know jargon okay?) to choose Windows when I need it.

Well today it's not there. Only the Linux entries show up. The Windows partition itself seems to be in good order, like, I can access it from within Linux no problem.

But yeah it doesn't show up on my EFI selector thingie. I imagine I could get the EFI Shell going, but I have no idea how to use THAT either.

 

PLEASE. I keep seeing it in memes. As I understand it the latest version of the xz package (present in rolling release distros like Arch and SUSE Tumbleweed) has "a backdoor", but I have no earthly clue what can be done by malicious folks with access to that backdoor or if I should be afraid or how to check if my distro is compromised or how to prevent damage if it is or (...)

 
10
[Goes cosmic] (cdn.kitty.social)
 

(my own art/animation)

 

Title. Plasma 6 just dropped on my arch-based distro, and it came with an option for a colorblindness correction filter:

Neat little tool that my Protanope ass was very excited about, and it works.

The thing is.

Some time ago Windows also introduced one of those, and in Windows, you can turn it on and off with a key-combination shortcut. I use that a lot on Windows, to keep the filter off and turn it on just when it is necessary (look, every person experiences colorblindness differently, and on my end, these filters while useful for certain kinds of work, are very ugly most other times)

Now, I already know I can set a key-combination shortcut to a terminal command on plasma. Easy peasy.

But for me to do that on plasma I'd need to have a way to switch the effect on and off from the terminal.

I know that I can do systemsettings kcm_kwin_effects to launch the configs app straight into the relevant tab. But now I'm wondering if I could make that even more automatic, maybe using the --args thing, which apparently is literally meant for sending commands directly to the configuration module. But then I wouldn't know what the command is.

 

Rebooted my computer earlier today and walked away while it did its thing. When I got back to to it some minutes later, I saw a black screen with that "_" text cursor flashing on the topleft corner. Which was, of course, odd.

Hitting Ctrl+Alt+F2 sent me to the TTY. Which is to say: The system was still up, and indeed, calling for a process manager loaded showed that sddm was still running, as were a bunch of other processes.

Still, attempts to get sddm to do its thing failed. I tried to systemctl restart the sddm service, I tried to reboot the computer. I tried to delete customizations to its config files in case they were breaking something.

In all of those cases -- Title happened. The mouse cursor would show up for a second or two. And then it'd kick me back to the black screen with text cursor because something was fucked.

I eventually managed to get to my desktop by entirely disabling the sddm service, rebooting so I'd just get the TTY, and then doing dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland to run Plasma manually once logged in (thank FUCK for smartphones and access to internet search on them for helping me figure this out).

So that's a workaround, and it sorta works but I'd like to get my display manager back, please. :P

Further information:

  • I am running EndeavourOS.
  • As implied, I use KDE Plasma under Wayland as my DE.
  • I have an AMD GPU
  • I am at the latest version of every relevant package -- The reboot I mentioned at the start of the thread was just after running a sudo pacman -Syyu
  • I did try to search for my specific issue but nothing relevant came up? A lot of older issues, under X11, and most involving NVidia stuff. None seemed relevant to my case.
  • Having found the workaround I used the computer all night and had no other issues, which to me signals it's something about sddm and ONLY sddm that is broken, whether it's some config that got fucked up or some bs with my own incompetent package management.
  • I am, of course, able to provide logs and stuff if you tell me which ones and where to get them, cuz yeah.
 

alt text: "the state of the animation industry"

"you're pirating that show? don't you wanna support the creators?" "I AM the creator."

"haha the only way I can show future employers my work is to send a link to a bunch of pirated copies of it haha what a nightmare haha"

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