I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume what you said was simply confusing, but not wrong.

So just to be clear if your raid array fails, and you’re using software raid, you can plug all of the disks into a new machine and use it there. But you can’t just take a single disk out of a raid 5 array, for example, and plug it in and use it as a normal USB hard drive that just had some of the files on it, or something. Even if you built the array using soft-raid.

I don’t want to sound like I’m just correcting you for the sake of it, but it’s actually important. Mastodon is the most popular right now, but Mastodon actually wasn’t around at the beginning! Before that was StatusNet, and before that was identi.ca and laconi.ca

So those services already existed, they were the ones built for federation, and so Mastodon was started as another compatible implementation of an existing network protocol. All of that is to say that Mastodon didn’t need to make the right choices at the beginning, and they have already benefitted from this kind of network dynamic! The system has already worked once!

Maybe I’m just pedantic, but if it’s on a phone or tablet, isn’t it not “PC gaming”? I’m honestly a little confused what they’re going for. I guess “mobile games of the graphical calibre expected of PC games”? But, like, Myst is a PC game. Monkey Island is a PC game. Thomas Was Alone is a PC game. There’s a wide range there in graphics… And phones are mobile…

I get what you’re saying, but I think the issue with optional memory safety features is that it’s hard to be sure you’re using it in all the places and hard to maintain that when someone can add a new allocation in the future, etc. It’s certainly doable, and maybe some static analysis tools out there can prove it’s all okay.

Whereas with Rust, it’s built from the ground up to prove exactly that, plus other things like no memory being shared between threads by accident etc. Rust makes it difficult and obvious to do the wrong thing, rather than that being the default.

Agreed!

I have never played a game with random strangers ever. But! My brother and sister both live hours away from me (and each other), and we keep in touch by playing online co-op games every week.

I have a group of friends that I have mostly kept in touch with by playing online games too.

So I agree with what I think you meant, but I’m very glad online multiplayer exists in some form.

Along with the others I’d also mention Outer Wilds and Viewfinder

I’m not the person you’re replying to, and I don’t have any videos, but I do love dumping explanation on people! So here’s some terms:

File System: This is the way data is laid out in terms of actual bytes on the drive. It’s in charge of things like where to look to find the name of this file, or how to “last modified” date is stored, or how do I find out which files are in this folder. NTFS is a filesystem, whereas ext4 is probably the file system your linux machine is using. FAT is the older Windows one that’s still used on, like, SD Cards and stuff. That having been said File System is sometimes also used to refer to the particular data on a particular partition of a disk, like “the filesystem will allow” which really means the data on your NTFS partition. Filesystem is often abbreviated “fs”, and is in fact the “FS” of “NTFS”

Mounting: In unix systems, such as Linux, file systems are “mounted” to a place in the folder hierarchy. Everything in unix lives somewhere under the “root” folder /, so mounting is basically saying “Okay, you want to see the files in this filesystem. Where should I put them?”, and if you say /home/user/stuff then the file “one.txt” at the root of your filesystem will now be visible at /home/user/stuff/one.txt", and if you mounted it at /mnt/things it would be /mnt/things/one.txt. The term mount is used like “attach” to mean “where do you want me to hang this new directory hierarchy on your existing one”.

fstab: There are a few ways to mount things in modern linux. The classic is the mount command which looks something like mount /dev/sda1 /home/user/stuff which would take the device with the name /dev/sda1 and mounts it to the given path. Devices in linux usually live in /dev, and in this case are often given names like sda1 to represent the first hard drive (a), and the first partition of that drive (1). But, there are other ways! You can also click on the partition in your file browser and it will mount the disk for you, often auto-creating a mount path and cleaning it up when you’re done, so you don’t even have to think about it. Another way is fstab, which is a kind of config file that controls mounting devices. In here you can give default options for how you want drives to be mounted, and can even specify that you’d like some devices to be automatically mounted by the system on startup. This is actually an important part of how unix systems start, and how the root filesystem and other important ones get going. If you wanted your NTFS drive to always be available at a permanent location, you would edit this file to set that up. If this is something you wanted only periodically, then just clicking may be fine.

Permissions: Virtually all unix filesystems store the permissions of files and directories as a “user” and “group” that owns the files, and then a set of whether or not the owner can “read” “write” and “execute” the file, whether other members of the group can, and then whether everyone else can. If two people were on the same computer, these would allow a person to be able to see their own documents, but not see the documents by other users. Or maybe they can see them but can’t make changes. And it also prevents random users of a system from changing important system configuration, when those config files are owned by the administrative user (called root by convention). Some config files will be read-only to normal users, and some contain secrets and so are permissioned so normal users can’t even see them. But! NFTS doesn’t follow these same conventions, so when mounting an NTFS drive on unix the driver has to produce a set of permissions that are unix-compatible, but it doesn’t have anything to work off on the disk. So the person above was saying by default it assumes the safest option is to make all files owned by the user root, and so if the permissions are the only the owner can write the files, and the owner is root, this will mean it’s effectively “read-only” to you. The terms uid and gid stand for “user ID” and “group ID”, which are the numbers that represent a user in the data. User names are basically a convenience that allows us to give a name to a uid, but it’s more efficient to store one number everywhere on disk for owner rather than a name.

So putting it all together, what they’re suggesting is that you can use the /etc/fstab file, which has a very particular format, to specify default options when mounting your drive. These options include setting the uid option and gid option to your user’s uid and gid, so that when the filesystem is mounted, it will appear that all the files are owned by you, so you’ll have full permissions on them. They’ve assumed your uid and gid will be 1000 because that’s a common convention, but if you’re comfortable you can run the id command on the command line to output your actual uid and gid (you can ignore all the other groups your user is in for now)

They also mentioned that when mounting you can specify if you want to mount the filesystem as “read-only” or “read-write”, etc. If you mount the whole filesystem read-only, then the write permissions stored on the individual files are ignored, basically. So if you were mounting with a command, or through fstab, you should make sure the rw option is present to clarify that you’re looking for “read write” permissions on your mount.

That having been said, it’s possible none of that is relevant to you if you’re mounting the fs by just clicking in your file browser. One way to tell is if you right-click on some file you aren’t allowed to edit and look at the properties there should be a Permissions tab thing. And it will list the owner of the file and what access you have. If those permissions are already set to be owned by you, then this uid thing is already taken care of for you by the file browser. In that case it might be something more fundamental to the NTFS filesystem, like the locks other people are talking about.

So those are some words and their meanings! Probably more than you wanted to know, but that’s okay. I liked typing it

I think I may have contracted some kind of brain worm, because the other day I needed to do some photo manipulation and couldn’t get krita to do what I wanted, but I went into gimp and just knocked it out. I’ve hated gimp for years, but I guess I’ve used it enough that I’ve figured out how it works… and now I don’t hate it anymore…

I think I may need help.

Oh, but I always use it in single window mode ever since that came out. The multiple windows floating panel thing drove me nuts!

Yeah basically! There’s a reason most romantic comedies end with them starting to date. It’s because that’s the zany exciting bit. After that part, the next 40 years or whatever is a roommate who lives in your home with you, and you do taxes together, and you eat dinner together, and you go to your shared friend’s homes to hang out, and maybe you teach weird little gremlins how to be humans, and you talk after work about how your day went, and what you’re planning to do in the future.

And that stuff can be great! But looking like a model doesn’t make that stuff much better. Even people who live with models probably “get over it” pretty quick. You can’t be in awe 18 hours a day every day for 15 years. But, having a shared foundation of experiences and mutual respect does make those things easier. Liking each other’s friends does too.

You can learn to love someone, and you can learn to find an attractive person unattractive through interaction.

Can’t tell if trolling, quipping, or honestly asking…

I feel like some people who don’t want friends are often people with low self esteem who have decided their hypothetical future friends will abandon them, or not like them, or whatever, and so they convince themselves that they “don’t want that anyway” as a way of protecting themselves from future pain or embarrassment. In those cases, dating aside, the person should work on their self esteem.

If it’s not that, one could try casual hookup apps. These rely on a certain amount of work, and there’s no guarantee, especially if one lives in a less populated area, but it’s possible.

And the third option for someone who doesn’t want anything social and just wants sex, is sex work. This is exactly what it can be for! The only trouble is that in most places it’s illegal, which pushes it underground, making it both difficult to find and potentially dangerous… but this is the niche it’s meant to occupy.

But honestly… at least consider that it may be the first case, and see if you can search your feelings to figure out “why”.

One thing you could try, if you haven’t, is dating someone you connect with, and have a fun time with, even without “romantic spark”. Attraction can be important in a relationship, but in a long term relationship spark often doesn’t last anyway, and it’s other things that actually keep people together. Getting along well, working well together, handling stress in complementary ways, etc, are all more valuable long term.

So just as an experiment you could try dating someone for something “long”, but not actually that long in the grand scheme of things. Maybe 3 months, roughly one season. Even if you’re not physically attracted to them, try dating them anyway. If it doesn’t work, you haven’t actually lost anything. Just a bit of time. And you will have officially “had a girlfriend”, and gained some amount of relationship experience, even if it wasn’t the best.

And if it just so happens that you’re just not an “early term” guy, buf you’re actually a pretty good “mid-term” guy, then that’s great! Keep going! You haven’t got a lot to lose, in a sense, so you’re available for experimentation.

You’re not alone! This concept is called Liquid Democracy

I think that’s too much thinking, I’m pretty sure it’s simpler than that. North Americans say “December Twelfth” or “May Forth” or “March Fourteenth” rather than “The Fourteenth of March”.

So they go “March -> 3”, “Fourteenth -> 14”, and you get “3/14” that you can read from left to right as “March Fourteenth”. That’s about it, I’m pretty sure.

And so long as everyone agrees which one comes first it’s not ambiguous. Of course, everyone doesn’t agree, and there are logical reasons to pick the others, but this one is simply in reading order.

Zulu. It’s shorter and cooler

I have two criticisms of this view.

The first is the distinction between “replacing humans” and “making humans more productive”. I feel like there’s a misunderstanding on why companies hire people. I don’t hire 15 people to do one job because 15 is a magic number of people I have to hit. I hire 15 people because 14 people weren’t keeping up and it was worth more to my business to hire another expensive human to get more work done. So if suddenly 5 people could do the work of 15, because people became 3x more efficient, I’d probably fire 10 people. I no longer need them, because these 5 get the job done. I made the humans more effective, but given that humans are a replacement for humans, I now don’t need as many of those because I’ve replaced them with superhumans instead.

If I’m lucky as a company I could possibly keep the same number of people and do 3x as much business overall, but this assumes all parts of my business, or at least the core part, increases at the same time. If my accounting department becomes 3x as efficient but I still have the same amount of work for them to do because accounting isn’t the purpose of my business, then I’m probably going to let go some accountants because they’re all sitting around idle most of the time.

It used to be that a gang of 20 people would dig up a hold in the road, but now it’s one dude with an excavator.

The second thing is the assumption that AI art is being evaluated as art. We have this notion in our culture that artists all produce only the best novels and screenplays, and all art hangs in a gallery and people look at it and think about what the artist could have meant by this expression, etc. But that’s virtually no one in the grand scheme of things. The fact that most people know the names of a handful of “the most famous artists of all time”, and it’s like 30 people on the whole earth and some of them are dead should mean something.

Most writers write stuff like the text on an ad in a fishing magazine. Or fully internal corporate documents that are only seen by employees of that one company. Most visual artists draw icons for apps that never launch. Or the swoopy background for an article. Or did the book jacket for a book that sells 8 copies at a local tradeshow. If there’s a commercial for chips, someone had to write it, someone had to direct it, someone had to storyboard it. And no one put it in a museum and pondered its expression of the human experience. Some people make their whole living on those terrible stock photographs of a diverse set of people all laughing and putting their hands into the middle to show they’re a team.

Even if every artist with a name that anyone knows is unaffected by this, that can still represent a massive loss of work for basically all creative professionals.

You touched on some of these things but I think glossed over them too much. AI art may not replace “Art”, but virtually no one makes money from “Art”, and so it doesn’t have to replace it for people to have no job left.