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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Yes of course he needs to be prosecuted.

    I get that people hate insurance companies but at the end of the day this was a brutal and cold blooded murder.

    As unhappy as we may be at the state of the world, the last thing anyone should want is for things to be determined by who has the gun and is willing to shoot.

    Having said that though, maybe things are getting beyond the point of no return. Democracy in the US seems to be a joke, and the billionaire class have unfettered power. I worry we’re on trajectory towards violent revolution.

    The ambivelence and even open celebration of a shocking violent murder is a warning sign of how bad things are right now. Across the democratic world countries are devided and in flux because the political class is not listening to voters and in hoc to the billionaires.

    Trump in the US will be a mess. But France and Germany are also in political flux. What we are lacking globally at the moment is an outlet for this mess or a solution. People seem to be divided and unable to coalesce around a solution to the problems. I worry that means more chaos and ultimately violemce to come.








  • This is such a bizarre story. First as others pointed out 1 in 125 is 0.8% not 0.008%. They presumably forgot the 100 but in percent conversions. It’s presumably 0.8% as if it’s 0.008% then they’re saying 9billion devices were sold on the last quarter. At 0.8% it’s 90million laptop devices. They later say 20% of all laptop sales were AI laptops at 13.3 million which would be 66.5 million laptops overall, not 90milljon. 720,000 would actually 1.1% of all laptops and 5.4% of the AI subcategory.

    So whoever wrote the article doesn’t seem to know how to do basic maths? They also don’t make clear how they arrived at their figures with these contradictory figures elsewhere in their own article.

    But the main thing is this whole story is some bizarre idea that a new device getting nearly 1% of global sales in its first quarter is doing badly?

    To me that’s actually good? But maybe the manufacturer had some crazy expectations? Or maybe the writers think that all products should behave like incumbents?

    This reads like shitty journalism - trying to make big claims to get clicks. I have no idea if the product is doing well or not versus expectations, but I don’t trust this articles take on it.

    I’m personally skeptical about the “AI” bullshit in these products, but I do think the power efficiency of ARM chips may give these Snapdragon X a chance to take market share from traditional chips.




  • Politicians would be better focusing on things that matter like how the Democrats lost the election to Trump and how they’re going to win the midterms.

    A crappy paper finding rude words and phrases on steam is not really worthy of anyone’s attention but Valve’s

    “Millions” of examples sounds dramatic until you look at how many billions of exchanges have been made in valves forums and comment pages. It needs addressing but it’s not of international or even national importance.

    Instead of virtue signalling, Warren should be asking how the Dems managed to allow Biden a free ride through the primaries, held on til the bitter end blocking alternatives and then endorsing Harris blocking any debate.

    I’d rather Warren focus on fixing the Democratic Party. A bit of democracy in the Democrat party would be a start.



  • For electricity generation: Solar across the UK was about 5% in last year, while Wind was about 29% and Nuclear 13.9%, and hydro 1.3% - so 49.2% of electricity generation over the last 12 months was carbon neutral.

    That’s a huge success story - still a long way to go, particularly as that does not include Gas burned in homes, but the UK is moving in the right direction. And Scotland is a huge source of Wind & Hydro power for the whole country.

    So even if the barriers to solar in your home are still high, the grid is getting cleaner and cleaner every year. There are also community projects installing wind generators which you can join/invest in if you do want to try and get a slice of cleaner energy and solar is not realistic.

    Edit: Source on UK electricity generation: https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/historical Good data on UK electricity generation


  • Polyamory is more common these days. It may be experimentation or real for her - only she can decide that. Be there for her, try to not to seem judgemental or negative so that she can trust you and be open with you if things do go wrong. That also means being accepting if this goes right for her.

    I do wonder whether you are misinterpreting what you are seeing too.

    You are seeing the guy as in control of this and bringing his 2nd girlfriend along. But actually she brought her boyfriend and a girl to dinner at home. Is your daughter also trying to tell you she is in a relationship with the girl too? Was it her boyfriend and her girlfriend?

    It does seems odd to bring the girl to meet you if she was purely his girlfriend. Maybe she is more to your daughter than that or maybe she was trying to get a rise out of you? Or maybe she just wanted you to understand how the Polyamory thing works?

    I do understand your reluctance around this, and your likely worries for your daughter. It’s easy to see her as being the “victim” of her boyfriends wants. But she does have agency and she has chosen this lifestyle - so I think you have to let it play out and be cautious about expressing your concerns too hard as it may push her away.

    Be there for her - it’s very important to keep being her support network and not inadvertently isolate her if you disapprove of her lifestyle. You need to be the ones who are there for her no matter what and where she comes for advice and support if this does goes wrong.


  • Interesting. Although I’d contend no one “celebrates” daylight savings. It’s not a holiday, and unfortunately saying “it’s not 9am in my house” probably won’t get people far.

    I do like the percentage clock idea.

    I have a 24 hour analogue clock on my wall - one turn of the clock with the hour hand is a full 24 hours instead of 12. It really changed my concept of time in the day. 12 noon is at the bottom of the clock.

    It always feels striking to see the clock at noon and realise how small the morning really is due to sleep and how much of the day is left.


  • It was intended to bring the existing Julian calendar in Eastern orthodox churches closer in to line with the gregorian calendar. It was not meant to be a universal calendar.

    It’s not realistic to alter the existing calendar in this day and age. The gregorian calendar was already too embedded in 1923 to change, and now it’s globally dominant.

    The only way to replace the calendar now would probably have to be a brand new calendar (to prevent confusion with the existing calendar, it’d need new month names for example) OR a global agreed change to the gregorian calendar.

    Neither is likely; there doesn’t seem to be a big enough need or benefit to get countries together to change this. They can’t even agree on action on pressing crises like the climate crisis.


  • Also English language books are going to be predominantly sold in English speaking countries. And it makes sense cost wise to target both markets together rather than printing individual runs priced for individual countries where possible.

    And Canada and the US both use dollars; there is potential ambiguity in price for manufacturers and retailers, so better to clearly specify both. There is not ambiguity with the peso - if a customer sees a book is $10 they will know there is a different price in pesos.


  • As people have said, you can add Jellyfin as a service to start with windows regardless of users being logged in.

    No one seems to have said how to do this.

    The easiest way is to use the NSSM open source tool - it stands for “Non Sucking Service Manager” and it gives a GUI route to create services, as well as some useful reliability and fall back functions.

    It can also be used from the command line if you prefer but regardless it’s probably the easiest way without faffing around with powershell or command line and in built windows tools (which do suck).

    Edit. The official website is NSSM.cc and it includes guidance on how to use it. There are also plenty of guides online if you search “how to create a windows service”.

    Edit2: the easiest way is to use the Jellyfin windows installer itself but the documentation is pretty vague on that and gives a warning about ffmpeg config. It should work but using NSSM will give you more direct control. I think the installer uses NSSM anyway.


  • Yeah I get what you’re saying. I would put some caution for Fedora Kinoite - if you want a system that just works and you don’t want to tinker, then it’s great. It just works, and it updates in a very sane and stable why. But if you want to learn Linux and tinker, then it can be very frustrating working with an Atomic distro at the start.

    So if I was putting Linux on my parents laptop and didn’t want to be dealing with too much tech-support, I’d probably go for an atomic distro. But if the user wants to learn how to use linux, play with it, tinker then I think an atomic desktop is too restrictive to start out on.

    While Mint with Cinnamon isn’t the most cutting edge feel to it, there is a huge wealth of resources out there for people to tinker and play with the system and it’s a great spring board in to other parts of the Linux world. I do love KDE Plasma though - it’s my favourite DE and I used to run it on Mint before I finally moved to a KDE based distro.


  • I’d recommend Linux Mint generally for noobs. It’s popular and has lots of tips and advice available online, easy to find. It’s easy to install, and as it’s an Ubuntu derivative you get a lot of the benefits of the big user base without the downsides of Canonical (such as Snap being forced on you). I used to use Mint, and it’s a good stable daily driver.

    In terms of your specs, you should have no problem with running it as laptop, but as a 2-in-1 device you may find some specialised drivers don’t work out of the box. The most common is finger print readers, but also some of the switching between Desktop and Tablet mode can be tricky. Having said that, I own a Toshiba Satellite 2-in-1, and I installed Linux without issue. I don’t and never have really used it as an actual Tablet though; it ended up being a gimmick too far for me - they’re just too heavy and cumbersome as a tablet, and even the touch screen (which works fine in linux) is just a bit pointless for me. However I have KDE on my Toshiba now and it works well as a 2-in-1 for me at least.

    The best thing to do is flash a USB stick with Linux, for example Mint, and try it out to see how it works with your hardware “out of the box”. Linux Mint has a few spins for desktop environments: Cinnamon, XFCE and Mate. None of them are really designed to be Touch based interfaces to be honest. Cinnamon is the main/high end DE and it is ok with Touch interface.

    I would say KDE and Gnome are better DEs for touch screen and convertible devices; I personally prefer KDE but both support Touch well - they just have different design ethos. Both can be installed in Mint, although as they’re not “main” DEs for the distro you sometimes get some minor janky integration of the Mint tools in the KDE or Gnome desktop (e.g. sometimes the task tray icons for Cinnamon based tools just aren’t as well integrated into the system themes of KDE & Gnome). You also can end up with duplicate apps in your app menus (cinnamon tools sitting alongside native KDE/Gnome tools which can be a little irritating). But the system works fine and a lot of these things can be tidied up if it bothers you.

    But Mint is very Noob friendly, and I think it’s a good way to get into the Linux world. Pretty much everything can be done via the GUI, and it has opted for a default Windows-like feel which can really help with getting used to it. Cinnamon is also still pretty flexible for creating some other interfaces to experiment. Gnome is far removed from that windows feel and is also pretty rigid in it’s design philosophy - it’s kinda “take it or leave it”; personally I don’t like it. You can push it do other things though with extensions, so there is still potential to experiment. KDE does a good job of a default Windows feel but with more design flair/slicker feel, but it also has a huge range of options for making pretty much any interface you like. One reason I left Mint is because I wanted a distro which is built around KDE rather than me installing it separately (I’m on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed now).

    So overall, I’d recommend Mint, and use the Cinnamon version. Flash a USB and try it out (note it will be slower/feel sluggish compared to a native install, but should give a feel for how it handles your hardware). If you install it, I’d also recommend a dual-boot setup rather than ditching Windows completely if you’re completely new to Linux. Another option is install on a portable SSD attached via USB, and don’t touch your actual hard drive. That way you can get a reasonable feel of an actual Linux system without messing up your laptop. It’ll still be slower than a true native install but generally faster than a live-USB stick (you can of course also partition and install a full install on a USB stick itself rather than an SSD for the same effect).

    EDIT: Just worth saying; if you decide to install Linux, be very careful where you install it. Double and triple check, as the last thing you want to do is accidentally wipe your windows install!