• 9 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • De facto, no.

    Yes, there are still some services where there are absolutely zero questions asked and all you need is a prepaid card that doesn’t need to be activated at all. Those are quite rare and have a very limited number of phone numbers allocated to them and pretty much are all flagged as spam/bots by every single system out there.

    The next tier up are services where you technically don’t need to provide any ID to use a prepaid card… but the store you purchased it from needs your ID/credit card to activate the card when you buy it. Those ALSO tend to have the same problems with burned numbers.

    What most people have as burners these days are just the same phone service as anyone else. They just pay a rebranded t-mobile at the start of the month rather than the end of the month. And those have all the same restrictions, and capabilities, as “real” phone plans.



  • Strong disagree on sociopathy being linked to a hierarchy.

    The reality is that pretty much EVERY system of governance (that is meant to scale beyond five people in a field) needs a hierarchy of some form. Its the Whitest Kids U Know gag on anarchy where you quickly find out that there are people better suited to certain jobs and you need some degree of a social safety net to allow them to keep all of you alive (n that case, keeping a nuclear power plant from melting down… and then making t-shirts).

    It is why there are basically no flat Democracies. You inherently end up in some form of a Democratic Republic where The People elect representatives who can then (theoretically) spend all day educating themselves on important issues and figuring out how to make an educated vote that represents the will of their constituents.

    The core concept is just the reality of needing special skills and knowledge to make many decisions. There can be arguments that the people in charge of Directing The Military are still equal to the custodial staff keeping the streets clean but… moving on.

    Where sociopathy comes into play is that those roles tend to inherently attract power mad people (there is a DIFFERENT WKUK gag on this…). But hierarchical systems are a natural knock on from just having to have a socioeconomic system that scales.



  • Part of it is that the vast majority (all?) of the communist regimes of the 20th century pretty rapidly descended into authoritarian hellscapes (Democracy/Capitalism took a few decades to catch up…). So people tend to less say “Well. The horrors that unfolded in X were a result of a misapplication of the core tenets of communism” and instead “My family literally had to flee a communist regime because we were being ethnically cleansed”

    Part of it is that Democracy/Capitalism won and very much built up Communism as a bogeyman for obvious political reasons.

    And the last part is that… Communism fundamentally requires a central source of power/truth. You can’t have a managed economy without folk managing it. Which, inherently, centralizes power which is one of the big first steps towards authoritarianism. Similar to how Democracy fundamentally enables populism and Capitalism oligarchy.





  • Ah. So graphene DOES have a system where it takes your entire existing OS, shrinks all the partitions on disk, installs itself around that, AND prevents the monitoring software from reporting that your 512 GB device is now actually a 128 GB one?

    Well color me surprised.

    Or, you know, more likely you end up wiping the existing OS by effectively factory resetting it. And then you ping the management software server saying “I need to reinstall your spyware” which triggers a flag that IT may or may not care about. Similarly, said spyware now wonders why your phone’s storage shrunk so massively and raises another flag.


  • Yeah… having to reprovision a phone because it just got reformatted is going to raise a red flag. And if you are installing a rogue OS on your work phone to prevent your employer from seeing what you are doing… I actually side with them when they fire your ass.


    Your nonsense makes sense if it is a personal device that you are using for work purposes. Which… I strongly oppose for a range of reasons. If your work wants you “on call” then they can provide a device. Otherwise you can never be off call.



  • Just to answer myself a bit:

    It is a bit jank and is not a true Lutris replacement as it is still just a prefix manager, but installing standalone games in Heroic seems pretty painless. It can generate a steam entry if I want to launch it that way and their logic for fetching icons seems pretty seamless. Just reinstalled Guild Wars 2 in it and grabbed Guild Wars 1 in prep for Reforged tomorrow.

    It DOES raise the problem of also being where I install my GoG games and my tendency to use GoG for some adult playtime games (will never understand why anyone plays those on Steam. We know why you went offline for 15 minutes…) but that feels like more of a me problem.

    I dunno. If Faugus can find a way to take advantage of user scripts for the more janky/modded installs, that would be awesome. But if all it does is set up a prefix and let me pick a few options? I already got that?


  • There are layers to this.

    Yes, there is zero chance any of these investments are going to turn a profit.

    But research and technology is fundamentally built around developing capabilities for long term power (soft or hard). That is WHY governments invest so much into university groups and research divisions at companies to develop features of interest. You are never going to make back the money that funded hundreds of PhD students to develop a slightly more durable polymer compound. But you will benefit because you now have hundreds of new graduates aligned with fields of interest AND a slightly better grip on your military grade sybian.

    And, regardless of what people want to believe, AI genuinely does have some great uses (primarily pattern matching and human interfaces). And… those have very big implications both in terms of military capability and soft power where the entire world is dependent on one nation’s companies for basic functionality.

    Of course, the problem is that the “AI craze” isn’t really being driven by state governments at this point. It is being driven by the tech companies themselves and the politicians who profit off of them. Hence why we are so focused on insanely expensive search engine replacements and “AI powered toaster ovens” rather than developing the core technologies and capabilities that will make this more power efficient and more feasible for edge computing.

    And… when one of (if not ) the super powers is actively divesting itself of all soft power at an alarming rate… yeah.



  • Yeah. Fiddled with Heroic a bit to see if it could do generic installs. Not gonna lie… it took me WAY too long to realize “App Image” meant “icon” not “Appimage”. Shout out to A1RM4X for having a video that actually demonstrated how to use that. Will set up Guild Wars 2 on my laptop with that and see if I notice any meaningful difference from Lutris

    I would still prefer something that is built around scripted installs since a lot of games not in the major stores tend to be… kind of a cluster to get working. And it’s always struck me as kind of stupid to find the same gist everyone else used when that gist could just be a script the Launcher pulls. Although your experience very much highlights the dangers of that…


  • Yeah… that may be the video I was mentioning as being very clearly inspired by pewdiepie… That approach where it is clear they are emulating children’s shows because they want an audience with the attention span of a goldfish.

    But it also isn’t even really a good one for showing off what Faugus actually brings to the table? Installing ubi and ea is definitely nice. But he spends more time telling people he pirated games than actually showing off anything Faugus provides on the individual game front. And the reason why Lutris took off so much is that those community scripts actually were REALLY nice for not having to care what settings to use in wine or what TPLs are needed and so forth.

    Which gets back to it feeling like more of a replacement for Bottles than Lutris.



  • If you process digital photos, the edits get saved, so you can change them. It’s like a digital darkroom. I’d lose all that and be left with the unprocessed photos.

    And you export them when you are finished? So you have the unprocessed photos AND the finalized processed once? And you just have the ones that were in flight that are… in flight.

    But it sounds like you think this is worth using. If you think you understand the crack and understand the risks then go for it? Just understand that piracy of media and games is very different than piracy of productivity software and the risks and liability go up drastically with the latter.


  • I guess I am confused what what is actually going on.

    All your photos should be stored locally first. It looks like Capture One provides some form of cloud based access if you want to edit with a mobile device but you should still have the raw (possibly RAW format) files yourself?

    So the only thing you are “risking” is your most recent batch of edits that you haven’t exported/finalized yet. So if you are actually a hobbyist… who cares?

    As for whether you should crack it:

    1. If you are relying on cloud storage, this is a deeply stupid idea. They will have logs of your data store being accessed and will have logs of you not having a valid license. A paralegal can pound out the lawsuit over lunch.
    2. If you are less a “hobbyist” and more running a business (what it sounds like): You are inherently playing with fire if you use pirated software for profit. Up to you but my general rule of thumb is that if you are making enough to do something professionally then you are making enough to buy a seat for the industry standard software (or to take the time to learn something jank but cheap)

  • I’ll also add on that there are a LOT of blog posts and youtube shorts about “Game X is 20% faster on Linux than Windows!!!” that everyone loves to regurgitate. And the reality is that it was a single outlier or it all boils down to Steam distributing “good enough” shaders to Linux but not Windows (and let’s not get into the weeds of why).

    Whereas GN, especially since “All New Data” a few years back, have very heavily focused on reproducible and “good” data. That is why Steve basically apologized for not having error bars or having what looks like messy data for a few of those runs. And they’ve done entire videos on their testing methodology that often includes MANY runs to normalize out the noise.

    So without being able to explain exactly why? I doubt they will EVER put Windows and Linux data on even the same page of their website. But… someone who cares will be able to see trends.


  • And you can similarly do most/all of your dev work in a container that you spin up with a podman alias (fuck hashicorp with a rusty metal pole but damn if Vagrant wasn’t awesome). Hell, there are a lot of arguments that you should.

    It inherently becomes a question of what your primary use case for a machine is and how often you spend fighting it to accomplish that. And, personally, I run Linux so I DON’T have to fight my OS. Which… is really weird when you think about it but holy crap Windows and Mac are annoying.

    Immutable OSes are amazing for corporate environments and HTPC/Gaming computers are another solid use case. But if your primary focus is whether you can be a developer (as indicated by the doomemacs ask)… you are gonna be cranky.