I had to spend an annoying amount of time finding all of the settings to make it so that my windows machine would never wake up on its own, spread out over an even longer period of time because some of them aren’t easy to trigger on my own so it was a matter of trying something and then trying more things if I find it awake on its own again.

Even disabling the wake on mouse movement was a pain because it doesn’t properly label mice and keyboards and doesn’t have a global setting. I wanted to keep wake on keyboard but not have it wake if my mouse moved a nm because a butterfly flapped its wings too vigorously as it flew by the closed window.

After I installed Linux, I went to do the same thing there only to find it already had sensible defaults set.

It sounds like you might have some network places set up for windows to use but that are no longer reachable (or something along those lines) because that shouldn’t be taking so long so you might have things timing out in the background.

Or your internet is slow and it’s taking a long time to communicate with one drive or send its screenshots of your document to their creep department.

Or maybe a print driver that no longer exists still has an orphaned entry in the registry and it spends some time trying to locate it.

Or malware has set up hooks for any new window that pops up but the print to pdf dialog is set up in such a way that it churns very inefficiently on that window specifically.

I joke but any one of those might actually be what’s going on.

I just did the switch myself on a new PC and getting gaming working wasn’t even that hard. I picked fedora cinnamon.

Difficulties I had:

1. When trying the initial live boot, it failed checksum… Because windows fucked with the drive after it saw the utility that wrote the image to it left it “unmounted” (and autoplay would had also fucked with it if I hadn’t turned that off ages ago).
2. Wired ethernet wasn’t working. Wifi does work, currently using that until I get around to working on that again, though it might just work now that it’s updated.
3. After installing steam, many games said they were windows games only. Had to enable a setting inside steam to get it to just run them all via proton. Only tried two games so far, but haven’t seen any issues yet. My saves are usable on the one game I was already playing on windows.
4. Optical audio wasn’t working. Worked around that by plugging in my soundbar to usb, though I’ve also confirmed that the analog port does work. This one might also have been resolved by updating.
5. Had to set up permissions for steam to use my games partition instead of my home dir for installing games, though I think this was because I missed a step during the install.

It took more effort getting YouTube (well porn but apparently the same issue affects YouTube) working (netflix just worked, quality seems to even be better, like it doesn’t seem to default to a low quality stream before moving up as the video plays like it would in windows). And even that was only because the desktop I picked didn’t use the same software as instructions for enabling 3rd party repositories and I for some reason decided to search for a GUI option instead of just running the command I could have run from the start.

The only difficult part is that with all of the available desktops out there that do things a bit differently, it can be hard to find solutions specific to the one you’re using. Like I might have caused some future issues by installing gnome-software since cinnamon uses a different tool for that. But at this point, I feel like making the jump to a different desktop (or even distro) will be much easier, so don’t feel like I’m committed to the one I did pick.

Which is so much better than windows because on that platform I had to struggle to not be committed to things I didn’t and wouldn’t pick. And it made me avoid updating often because I didn’t want to commit to whatever nagware ms added this time to try to get me to use some software I wasn’t interested in using.

The avatar bit is kinda funny because, if anything, between Ang and Korra, I (male) find Korra more relatable. Their ages had a bigger impact on that than their genders.

My guess is they oursourced the work to people who only understand basic English and answer the question they were able to decipher from a few keywords and the assumption that the question is about the most basic aspect of those keywords.

With an alternative method involving a page in settings that only existed between may 2015 and feb 2016.

Neither do the two gravity wells the stick spans. And the earth and moon are moving relative to each other, someone would probably get their head knocked off by that stick. Before it eventually falls to the earth with quite a bit of force because earth’s gravity well will win. Then it’ll eventually settle into a giant teeter totter, assuming it is rigid enough to survive the impact.

Was doing some woodworking with the big power tools my dad had set up in the basement. First time using the table saw, I start my cut and realize the blade wasn’t high enough and wasn’t cutting through the whole piece of wood. I knew that I couldn’t let go of the wood while the machine was running, or it would become a projectile.

So I turned it off and immediately let it go, turning it into a projectile because the blade was still spinning. Luckily it only caught the back of my finger, though it left a scar.

One part would be to run a shadow client that takes the user’s input and sees how much the game state diverges. There will be a certain amount of it due to network latency, but if there’s some cheater using an engine mod/hack to fly around the map, this will catch that. Though something like that should be caught by a lower level check that makes sure the players are following the laws of physics in the game (like max speed, gravity applies, no teleporting).

Another one would be to see if the player follows things they shouldn’t be able to see. If a player hides behind something they can shoot through but can’t see through, do they somehow seem to always know they are there? Do they look around at walls and then beeline for an opponent that was hidden by those walls?

Another one would be if their movement (view angle) changes when they are close to targeting an enemy or if they consistently shoot when the enemy is centre of target, then it’s a sign they are using a device that even kernel mode anti cheat won’t catch to cheat (it plugs in to your input between your mouse and PC, also plugs in to somewhere that would allow it to act as a video capture device, then just watches for enemies to get close and sends movement or clicks to aim or shoot for you). Though this one is pretty difficult to catch, due to network latency. But those mouse movements might defy the laws of physics if the user was already moving. Natural movement is continuous in position and its first derivative (always, by Newton’s f = ma, though sample rate complicates that), and the way we generally move is also continuous in the second derivative, but banging your mouse into your keyboard can defy that and it’s even more sensitive to sample rate.

Imo these techniques should be combined with a reporting system and manual reviews. Reports would activate the extra checks for specific players (it would be pretty expensive to do it for all players), then positive matches from the extra checks would trigger a manual review and maybe a kick or temp ban, depending on how reliable the checks are.

That said, I believe there will eventually be AI-based bots where detecting them vs other skilled players will be impossible. And those will be combinable with some infrastructure that allows players to take certain amounts of control, maybe even with an RTS-like interface that could direct the bot to certain areas. Though adding an LLM and speech to text and vice versa could allow it to just respond to voice commands, both from other teammates and from the player.

I think at that point, preventing cheating in online games will be impossible and in person tournaments will probably involve using computers provided by the organizers (tbh I’m kinda surprised this isn’t already the case and that some people have been caught using cheats during these kinds of tournaments).

I’ve always interpreted the other thing coming as a threat or an unpleasant surprise. Ie, the consequences of thinking the thing they think.

Shouldn’t that be semi-monthly? Rounding months to 4 weeks, of course.

Or maybe that’s just me wanting bi and semi to have consistent meanings. Bi is two, semi is a half.

No, you must go back and tell him that the moon moves at a very predictable rate and once you get close enough it will even pull you in.

Also I’m pretty sure the ISS moves a lot faster than the moon but we still manage to dock spacecraft with it. I’m pretty sure it’s a bit smaller than the moon and docking can require higher precision than landing on a surface. Even Boeing managed to do it.

Though even in that case, I’d consider water consumed to be covered under “food”.

The only exceptions I can think of are from gaining mass from things other than what you eat. Like tar buildup from smoking, snorting or injecting various substances, boffing something (I think that’s what it’s called… Up the butt instead of out the butt), things sticking to your skin, absorbing through the skin, or bugs/aliens laying eggs inside you. Maybe getting possessed by a ghost, if ghosts have mass. But I don’t think all of those combined would even come close to a single meal, other than extreme cases.

I was curious and looked into how much mass the average adult loses through breathing, and apparently it’s at least about 69g (at rest, if you are metabolizing fat).

Personally, I like vim. I do miss the mini map to speed up navigating through code, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a random crash or have it inadvertently fill up my home dir because I’ve had it open for too long.

That uninstalling python2 bit reminds me of stories of users deleting their system32 folder to free up disk space.

I wonder if that was actually malware.

That’s pretty smart, using it for legal documents. If the accuracy is high, it might be nice to just copy paste any tos or whatever to get the highlights in plain language (which imo should be a legal requirement of contracts in general, but especially ones written by a team of bad faith lawyers intended for people they don’t expect to read it and deliberately written to discourage reading the whole thing).

Many bigots feel entitled to their bigotry but would probably be outraged if they knew some of the other things the people around them at the rallies they attend believe.

I think you’re overfitting to the average here with your expectations. Especially basing that on the experience level of people who would sign up for help learning how to use Windows products. And even then, the ones learning about copy/paste for the first time will likely make more noise about it then those waiting to see if you’ll teach them something new or any that ended up in your training because their work made them or something.

While the majority might lack familiarity, the 40 - 80 age range includes tons of people that have been working with computers (windows or otherwise) since before Windows was even a thing, including many who worked on Windows and/or developed applications for it. Experience will range from not knowing what windows is, knowing it’s the OS but not knowing what an OS is, to understanding what goes on in the kernel at a high level of detail.

There’s a lot of people on Windows just because of inertia and Linux can handle a lot of the use cases. It makes perfect sense to me that someone, once they’ve seen that things aren’t so scary and different on the other side of the fence, would wonder out loud about why they thought their inertia was so strong.

Your skepticism is more baffling to me than that.

And it’s why I hate capitalism as a consumer.

“People need an incentive to invent things!”

Well, if that incentive is making money instead of making a great thing, it’s probably not going to be a great thing. Great things make money.