Libra00

There is (or at least used to be) a debug command to write-protect a hard drive. No idea what it’s for or why such a thing exists, but you flip a certain bit from 0 to 1 and drive no write. I won $100 once at work with this knowledge. We had a training course about how much better the new version of windows at the time was and how much harder it was to break - so hard they’d pay $100 (in early 2000s money) to anyone who could unrecoverably break their demo windows install during the 10 minute presentation. The instructor (who worked for Microsoft) said he’d been doing this for 6 months and they’d never had to pay out that prize before, much less 30 seconds in.

If your goal is to, say, kill all of the tigers in the world, why would you be okay with making more baby tigers? Yeah the baby tigers are cute and can’t hurt anyone yet, but baby tigers don’t stay babies for long, and 100% of the large, angry tigers who like to eat people used to be baby tigers.

The goal of communism is not to turn every person into a capitalist, it’s to create a society/economy that meets the needs of all of its members instead of just those of the rich. Encouraging the working class to start businesses is just like making more baby tigers: it’s working in the opposite direction of your goal.

And the biggest hole in yours is that you can’t imagine that people have better shit to do than learn your job alongside their own just to make it a little easier on you. Call me when you’re spending hours every day studying up on medicine and law so that you can also find the answer to your simple medical/legal questions in 30 seconds online just like doctors and lawyers can.

What you have is a magical thing called ‘job security’ that others would kill for. You are needed to figure out complex technical computer shit because other people have other shit they want to be doing with their time. If they actually did as you suggested you wouldn’t have a job anymore. But instead of viewing that as a positive - instead of feeling needed and valued for something that you contribute to society - you choose to view it as a negative: any inconvenience exists solely to make your job harder, and how dare people not devote even more of their life to making yours a little easier? I know, I felt exactly the same way when I worked IT, and it’s a big part of why I left.

Yes, companies are simplifying and refining things, in some cases they do remove functionality, that’s just the way technology works. My dad called himself a shade-tree mechanic, but when I was growing up there was nothing on a car he couldn’t fix. Nowadays he takes it to the shop not because he’s prevented from fixing it but because cars have gotten vastly more complicated in the ensuing ~40 years and he - despite being a very capable and technically-minded person - just couldn’t keep up with it anymore because the business of doing his job and raising his family was more important.

If you want to be angry at companies for obfuscating or removing functionality then brother I’m right there with you. Just don’t be making assumptions about other peoples’ intelligence just because they don’t have the time or interest to sink countless hours into this just to make your life a little easier.

Society should exist for the sole purpose of bettering the lives of all of its members. Anything that goes against that is inappropriate in my book. Right now democracy is going against that pretty hard in the US.

Heh, I do to a little bit, but starting in high school I was just actively correcting my twang hard until I just had like a generic American accent. Somehow from that effort I’ve picked up localisms from all over the US (I have moved a lot, but that was years later), like I use ‘soda’ instead of ‘coke’. Nowadays you’d never be able to tell unless I was drunk as shit, which I don’t do more than once every few years at best, cause even without the accent I don’t talk like an Okie anymore.

That’s fair, i didn’t catch the ‘certain kind’ in the original. My bad.

And yeah I was by no means saying all old people will be fine anyway. But I’ve played a fair bit of it and all you have to do is type or sometimes draw on your phone. People do the former all day, and the latter isn’t terribly different from just navigating since it’s a touchscreen. shrug No doubt some people will find a way to block even that from their mind, but.

It has not been my experience that MS removes or weakens tools like that. What they do is hide them, like what they did in the transition from the control panel to the modern settings interface in 10/11. It’s easier for people who don’t know what they’re doing to navigate (and harder for them to stumble into settings that could really mess things up), but it’s just slower to navigate and harder to find the shit you want when you’re not doing bog-standard end-user stuff. But also the control panel is still there and still works exactly how it used to, so you can just use it instead. If there’s a ‘watering down’ there it’s that the search function prefers to return results for for the settings menu rather than the control panel so you have to navigate to it by hand, but you can just pin that shit to your start menu like everything else and keep using it like it’s still 2005.

The entire design is focused around making things HARDER to use. Less reliance on a terminal, dynamic menus whose contents are clusterfucked into little panels instead of proper menus.

Only for people who are doing complex technical stuff and accessing features that aren’t commonly needed by the end-user. For everyone else not having 400 options that they don’t understand and will never use cluttering everything up makes it easier to use, not harder. Most end-users never want to see a terminal, and those clustered toolbars make it easier - when coming at it fresh without years or decades of expectations - not harder to find what what you’re looking for. Especially if you’re visually impaired like I am. This strikes me as just ‘the way I learned is faster’ without the awareness that it’s because you took the time to learn it and don’t want to have to learn something new. And I get it. I spent hours and hours learning all of the menu hotkey combinations for Lotus 1-2-3 in the late 80s, and I was fast as shit at plucking out those obscure features from 12 menus deep with a few keystrokes, so I was very salty when Excel came along and displaced it with its graphical menus and mouse pointer that was so much slower than the hotkeys I had learned. But also Excel was vastly more popular than Lotus 1-2-3 ever was because it was a lot easier for accountants to use, and Excel has (or had, I haven’t used it in a while) hotkeys for most of its menu items anyway (alt+key to pull down a menu, then each entry had a letter underlined so you could quickly pick that option, much like using /, (w)orksheet, ©olumn, (a)dd or whatever from Lotus 1-2-3.)

That’s not ‘watering down’, that’s improving: making things better for the vast majority of people, while requiring folks like us - whose entire job is to learn and understand computer shit - to bear the burden of having to relearn a few things. I guarantee you there were programmers out there complaining about the widespread adoption of early high-level languages because ‘by god the best way to code is to manually flip the bits in core memory with a magnet’ or whatever, but it’s no different than when new laws get passed or new diagnostic or treatment standards get approved. Technological progress and reinvention is just the nature of living in an industrial society. If you don’t want to keep up with it, pick another field like I did.

when I get a flu shot, I sit in a chair and somebody who knows how to administer the shot gives it to me. … Same with leases, I may sign one every few years at most, and if it’s for something serious then I would get a lawyer involved.

Exactly my point: you and an accountant both have a very shallow, straightforward experience with a complex technical subject because others have gone to considerable lengths to take care of the immense volume of technical details and obscure them from your view. I’m going to guess that you understand as much about how to safely store and administer vaccines or which of 12 related statutes applies to your particular case as he does about the SMTP protocol or Ethernet, so why do you expect him to not get a professional involved when he runs into ‘something serious’ just like you do? And keep in mind that what seems trivial to you or I can be quite serious and intractable to him.

I am at least competent enough to sit in the chair and get the shot without asking “what’s a chair? How do I sit? Where is my arm?” Likewise, I can read a lease and not have to ask “What is a lease? What is a signature? How do I sign this page?” I can’t say the same about people in 2025 who say “What’s the start button?” or have no idea that decades-old shortcuts like ctrl+c and ctrl+v are things.

This is a straw man. You are exaggerating the stupidity of others to create a false example against which you are arguing, and while a few of those people certainly exist (I had a guy tell me his computer wouldn’t turn on and then when I asked him to try his response was to loudly say ‘Computer, on! – see? Nothing happens’), most people can muddle through simple stuff like navigating menus even if they don’t know what they’re called.

I did tech support for a couple of years in the late 90s, I have walked people who have literally never touched a computer before through replacing their motherboard (CPU, RAM, cables, even DIP switches and jumpers.) It’s been my experience that there’s a kind of mental line that most people draw that separates technical stuff into two categories: ‘I can probably figure this out’, and ‘OMG this is way too much I don’t even know where to start.’ I have talked to many, many people on both sides of that line, and there seems to be no middle ground. People go from ‘I think I can swim?’ straight to ‘holy shit I’m drowning’. When they’ve assigned computer stuff to the far side of that line they actively reject thinking about it, especially when jargon is involved. If you ask them where their files are stored they might gesture vaguely at the box under their desk, but if you ask them what a hard drive is they will shrug and go ‘Iono man, must be some of that wacky technical shit I don’t understand’. They have some idea what a hard drive - or a start button - is, they use it every day, but if you put them on the spot while they’re in ‘I dunno anything’ mode they’re not even going to try to make the connection and ask ‘wait, is that the menu that all my programs are in?’, they’ll just go ‘Dunno man, that must be some of that technical shit that’s beyond me.’

And it works both ways. I have had certified network engineers tell me ‘Of course it’s plugged in, what kind of an idiot do you think I am?’ when it turned out not to be plugged in. There’s the stuff you know and the stuff you feel confident stretching for; everything else just doesn’t even get considered.

As for how to copy/paste on those older computers - I guess it depends on how you’re accessing them as to whether or not you even can copy/paste. But at the same time, I wouldn’t be nearly as frustrated if somebody wasn’t quite sure how to navigate through something that isn’t as commonplace as a Windows computer - you might as well say you’re “not very competent with pencils and paper”.

The point is that you don’t know because you don’t have to, you’ve never had to use them (and what’s ‘commonplace’ for you isn’t necessarily common at all for others.) The same is true for those people who have been working in banks for decades and haven’t seen anything more modern than an IBM PCjr. Your frustration that people don’t understand stuff that’s common to you is equivalent to their frustration that you don’t know how to write programs in RPG2 or Fortran. They probably don’t think you’re stupid for not knowing why certain kinds of RAM can cause ‘make world’ on BSD systems to fail halfway through, so why do you think they are for not knowing stuff that they may not have been exposed to very much?

I think your expectations might be rather skewed. For example, do you know how common it is to just not own a PC in the days of ubiquitous consoles and tablets and smartphones? I have 11 adult nieces and nephews, two of them own PCs, and only then because their mother wanted someone to play WoW with her when they were kids and they stuck with PC gaming. But every one of them has a phone, at least an xbox or playstation, most of them own a Switch or Steam deck or similar, etc. Meanwhile the last console I owned still had wood paneling on the front (Atari 2600.) Peoples’ experiences with technology are different, some are intrigued by it and drawn to learn more, some just see it as a tool that sits in a drawer until they need to turn some metaphorical bolts. It’s absurd to assume that everyone has the same experience and interest and understanding with a subject that you do.

That’s not an accurate analogy. A more accurate one would be: ‘Most old people don’t know how to weld.’ ‘Really? I’m old and I know how to weld.’ I’m pointing out that broad generalizations are inaccurate at best.

What does ‘watering down’ even mean? Why is ‘user friendliness’ bad? Do you want computers that are harder to use for some reason? If that was the case why don’t you also give up your favorite OS or interface or language and go back to carting around stacks of punch-cards or flipping physical switches to set memory registers? Or are you just trying to make yourself feel superior as a technically-minded person?

Also, I dunno if you know this, but people interact with health and legal shit all the time, that’s why there are people who only do that job. Reading some email and punching some numbers into an excel sheet are about the equivalent of signing a lease or getting a flu shot. It’s not their job to know how things work behind the scenes, just like it’s not your job to know how to make vaccines or write legally binding contracts.

And finally, you’re forgetting two important facts.

1. Older people tend to have been in their jobs longer, and at higher levels where their computer expertise matters less and less
2. Companies, especially in certain industries, don’t update their hardware/software as often as IT would like them to

So that old guy you think ought to be able to know what a start button is might have never seen one because the only computers they use at work are old SPARCstations from the early 2000s, or might’ve worked in a bank for the last 50 years that is still using AS/400s from the late 80s or whatever; those machines can’t even run windows. You tell me, what are the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste on a DEC Alpha? Where’s the power button on an SGI Onyx? I worked IT in a hospital in the late 90s that was still using computers from the early 70s and shit, it happens way more often than you think.

How old is old? Cause I’m 52 and have no trouble with it. :P But I also worked in IT and cybersecurity for ~20 years, so technology never bothered me.

Jackbox. Each one has several party games, everybody can play on their phone, and it’s lots of fun while being fairly simple.

Because light is affected by gravity but gravity isn’t. Gravity—the curvature of space-time—can’t stop changes in the curvature of spacetime from propagating outward. But also that information isn’t coming from inside the event horizon, it’s coming from spacetime around it.

This is a long one. I used to have very frequent, intense, vivid dreams when I was younger, and this one stands out even among those. I had this dream when I was in my mid-20s, and 30 years later I still remember it like it was yesterday.

I dreamed about these monsters called blood-bats that were ~3’ tall, squat, red-skinned, winged monsters with 3 big black claws on each hand. They would claw people and leave long, white lines on their flesh, draining them of blood and also the will to live. I dreamed I had gone to Marrakesh (for some reason) and the streets were filled with people who all had these marks on their arms or chest or whatever, and they were all just shuffling around like they were zombies, staring at the ground, etc. They were all kind of moving in one direction, so I pushed through the crowd in that direction and eventually discovered a palace that appeared to be their destination. Inside the palace was this long, wide great hall that was lined by these little booths that each had a priest of some religion or other in it. The people were all lining up to go into the booth of their choosing where they would kneel on a small carpet, the priest would bless them, and they would collapse and a pair of orderlies would put them in a body bag and carry them away.

I was determined to find out what was really going on here, why all these people appeared to be grimly shuffling off to their ultimate demise, so I skipped out of the line and found myself in an elevator. As the elevator started going down one of the creatures came in through the hatch in the ceiling and attacked me, but I managed to fight it off without getting clawed and it fled. Pretty soon the elevator stopped and the door opened and I found myself in this vast open warehouse-like structure filled with thousands of hospital beds, each one with one of these creatures on it. There was an old man pushing a cart around from bed to bed checking on them. I approached and asked him what the shit was going on and he explained that these creatures were from another dimension, that they traveled between dimensions hunting sapient life to drain as a food source. The way they hop dimensions is they make someone where they want to go dream about them - usually only a few at most - and then when that person wakes up the ones they dreamed of would exist in that reality.

As soon as the old man finished telling me this I realized that I was dreaming and was about to wake up, only I wasn’t dreaming about 3-4 of these guys, I was dreaming about the entire race. In those hazy few seconds between being fully engaged in the dream and fully awake I was frantically searching around both the dreamscape and my bedroom for anything sharp that I could use to kill myself before I woke up and brought all of them here. Fortunately reality reasserted itself in pretty short order, but that handful of seconds might’ve been the most scared I’ve ever been.

Even weirder, several years after I had this dream a friend of mine described, without having heard about mine, a dream he had once had that featured virtually identical creatures, but in his dream they were torturing people in dentist’s offices and shit. Kinda freaked me out.

I have to hit F11 to choose to boot the linux partition, at which point I get a grub menu. I don’t recall anything that says Plymouth on it, and I normally don’t get a text screen at all unless I boot into recovery mode, at which point I get the usual linux text-spam on boot.

Booting looks like: POST, F11 Select Linux to boot from (it’s listed as the 128GB SSD because that’s where the MBR/etc is, but linux is on a 1TB NVMe SSD) Get grub menu. Select Ubuntu. Wait a lot on a black screen. Get a brief Ubuntu logo that lasts a couple seconds. Black screen again for a few more seconds. No signal.

Remove other drives: no, that would be a significant pain in the ass. But also Pop worked installed on the same NVMe SSD with the same other drives in the system, so I’m pretty sure it’s not a drive/BIOS-related boot issue.

I’d be happy to chat, though I have no idea what matrix even is. Feel free to DM (does lemmy even do DMs? I’m still kinda new) if you want to try to get something like that set up tho. I’m on discord if that helps?

Probably re:Pop nvidia driver edition.

Monitor: HDMI cable straight into the #1 HDMI port on my GPU. Probably have a DP cable around here somewhere but haven’t felt like fucking with it since it worked fine on an HDMI cable on Pop. It’s a standard desktop setup, not a laptop with a docking station or anything.

Wayland/xorg: no clue, it never asked and I never saw even the first pixel of graphical anything.

Yeah I thought so too re:Pop/Ubuntu, part of the reason I tried Ubuntu is because it was similar but I hoped it would have more stable drivers or the like. shrug

Secure boot: I don’t remember (and can’t reboot to check bios) - I think I remember having to disable it when I installed Pop, but that was several months ago and my memory is shit.

Boot: Yes, the windows boot drive (an old 128GB SATA SSD), but I hit F11 on boot adn selected USB to boot to that to do the install just like with Pop. But again the install worked fine at least on the older LTS version of Ubuntu. And it booted on USB correctly with the later version too, just as soon as it went graphical it b0rked.

Spare laptop: nope. Closest I have is an old headless NAS box that’s running an old version of RedHat I think?, but also it’s been in my closet for ~5 years because I don’t really have anywhere to set it up. So mostly no.

Distros; I mean a lot of years ago i messed a lot with RedHat and before that Slackware, but nothing on this hardware. I have not tried Mint, and I’ve heard good things about it, but I mostly wanted to go with a main-line distro like ubuntu because a lot of the forum posts and such I found talking about how to fix random things seemed to be for ubuntu so it seemed like it’d be easier to get help on.

And no problem, I’m happy to answer if it means I can make this work.

Turnaround to what, exactly? A retreat from fascism would be great, don’t get me wrong, but what we had before wasn’t exactly working otherwise we wouldn’t have found ourselves in this situation. As much as Democrats like to blame Donald Trump for literally everything (and he’s certainly done enough), he’s just the manifestation of peoples’ resentment and desperation at how much this country doesn’t work for most of its people.

Worse still, even if there is a return to the status quo from say 10-20 years ago, aside from not fixing the problem, that will just make everyone focus more on their relief at not being under a fascist regime anymore and thus they will become even more complacent about the things that didn’t work before. The politicians who opposed this backslide into fascism - and their ‘vote blue no matter who’ supporters - will be ever more convinced of the rightness of their position and thus have even less reason to change anything, so we’ll just wind up right back here again.

But also, let’s address your specific complaints.

They complain about big tech having your information, but turn around wanting you to sign a petition that asks for your information.

Yeah, let’s not actually try to, you know, do anything about any of this, let’s just sit around and let those tech-bros enshittify their platforms and cram ads down our throats. Let’s not inconvenience anyone with a protest or a petition or a call to your representative, for shame! Also if you can’t see the difference between a giant, all-devouring megacorporation having your data and putting your email/phone# on a petition then I’m afraid it’s going to take more effort than I care to muster to unfuck your worldview, so, uh, good luck figuring that one out on your own.

They complain about commercials all year long, but will tune in by the millions for a Super Bowl

Are you sure these are the same people? You’re painting with an extremely broad brush here. I only have anecdotal evidence to offer, but I complain about commercials and I haven’t watched a Super Bowl ad in probably 20 years.

They complain about unfair wages, bad workplace environments and shitty bosses but didn’t make so much of a fuss during the pandemic.

So your issue is both that they complain, and that they don’t complain hard enough? Talk about having your cake and eating it too, you’re straddling that fence so hard you’ve found a way to whine about both sides of the same issue.

So what gives, really? … fuck the majority of Americans

Apparently what gives is that you are confused and angry and lashing out at people you don’t know for perceived slights you don’t seem to understand, wishing for the impossible return to a magical happy place that never existed (go ahead, ask those of us who remember the 2008 crash how great the world of 20 years ago was, I dare you) because you don’t understand that there is a world of distance between ‘not a complete dumpster fire’ and ‘actually decent.’ You seem to be mad at people who don’t vote the way you think they should without even attempting to understand where they’re coming from or what their motivations might be, you don’t seem capable of learning from the mistakes of the past that led to where we are today, or even particularly interested in acknowledging that they exist. You seem convinced despite generations of evidence that just voting harder will fix anything, and you ridicule the fact that other people have not somehow received this ultimate self-evident truth from on high as you have. And worst of all you seem too exasperated or confused by all of the above to try to actually change anything, you fail to understand, much less support and encourage, the means by which others are trying to do that, and you’re way too up your own ass to realize that everyone around you is a person with their own internal life, hopes, dreams, etc just like you, much less to have a shred of fucking empathy for anyone who isn’t within arm’s reach (and I’m skeptical about even that.)

In short, what gives is: Fuck you, and while you’re at it read a book, you’re embarrassing yourself.

I’ve tried PopOS 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS and 25.04.

PopOS mostly worked but almost none of my games worked, they acted like they weren’t being hardware accelerated by my GPU when they launched at all, and every time I tried to update the driver the install process hard-locked my system and when I rebooted it it came back up with no video driver at all. I was finally able to get one driver version to work, after doing about 10-15 install/reboot/unfuck cycles (the 555-server closed source driver.) I tried a couple versions of the open source drivers and they didn’t work either. I also had this weird issue with (I think it was) pipewire where my sound would cut out at random and the only way to get it back was to go into the sound control panel and toggle between speakers and headset repeatedly. I noticed this especially when joining a voice channel in discord, but it would just happen out of the blue too.

Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS installed fine but whenever it boots the monitor goes into standby with a no-signal notice. The system seems to be running, ctrl+alt+del reboots it, but I can’t even us ctrl+F2-6 to get a curses terminal where theoretically the video drivers shouldn’t matter at all? When I tried to install 25.04 (on the assumption that it would have a newer video driver) I booted on the USB key and even the installer didn’t work, same issue: monitor goes no-signal.

In case it matters, my specs are: Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9GHz 8-core Gigabyte Vision OC 12 RTX3060 w/12GB VRAM 32GB DDR4-3200 RAM Multiple SSDs, some SATA, some NVMe in M.2 slots, but I’ve only ever installed linux on my BPX Pro 1TB NVMe drive that’s ~4-5 years old.

That’s not it at all. You don’t think accountants who juggle numbers and Excel formulas all day couldn’t learn? Lawyers whose entire job involves absorbing and filtering vast amounts of information? Doctors who diagnose machines that are far more complex than computers (people)? Of course they could; I worked around these people in IT for 20 years, I can tell you that despite how stupid these folks seem around computers they feel the same way about your capabilities in their field of expertise, only they don’t have the arrogance to assume that everyone should learn to be a mechanical engineer or dentist in order to understand their job.

What they are is too busy doing other shit that they care more about. They don’t have the time or interest to be farting around with a computer to do anything more than the absolute minimum requirements needed to do the shit they actually care about. Human society functions because people specialize, and people who don’t specialize in making computers go just don’t care enough about them as anything other than as a tool and maybe an occasional source of entertainment to waste their time learning. Just like you don’t waste your time learning about how to run a nuclear power plant.

And I say this as someone who used to love tinkering with computers, turned it into a career, and slowly grew to hate it (never turn your hobby into a career if you want to keep that hobby.) I too no longer care about optimizing or fiddling or tweaking, I just want the magic box to work so I can do the stuff I care about (writing, gaming, etc.)

I actually think there’s some chance that linux has a lot of parts that were developed individually and thrown together and they don’t always work great together. I think linux still has markedly worse driver support (especially for nvidia GPUs apparently) than windows, and that in terms of just working out of the box on a wide range of hardware and use cases that windows has it beat and it’s not even that much of a contest. Yeah it can work, but it also seems to not work at least some of the time and then you don’t have repair shops, tech support, etc you can call to figure out why. The best you can hope for is to trawl through old reddit threads and hope the answer is contained within, that it applies to your distro, and that the commands and files it tells you to run and edit are in the same places with the same name, which is frankly by no means as guaranteed for linux as it is for windows. When I tell someone to go into their windows/system32 folder and find foo.dll then 99 times out of 100 there is a file called foo.dll in the windows/system32 folder that does exactly what I think it does. Linux is too varied. And that’s not a bad thing for most use cases, but it very much is for the widespread adoption use case.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate windows and would love to switch to linux full time, it’s just not working for me with some pretty bog-standard hardware on two different distros now with no indication as to even how I might go about fixing it other than ‘lol buy an AMD GPU’, so the odds are pretty good that I’m not the only person in history that that has happened for. I’ve never had problems like this on windows, I’ve never installed windows on normal hardware and had it just fail to work for no explicable reason, etc. I did IT for more than 20 years on both windows and linux computers and while I don’t have statistics I can tell you that anecdotally linux was generally more stable and had fewer problems once it was running, but that was also on servers doing (often-headless) server things, not desktops playing games or doing stuff with sound or multimedia or running general software and shit.

I think that until most people can figure out how to install linux - and I would say probably 80% of them, minimum, lack the time, patience, or technical knowledge to do so because it’s not just ‘press button, receive OS’ like windows is - and have it just work the vast majority of the time then it’s not ready for widespread adoption. Preinstalling on known hardware is a different matter and could probably work for many cases until something goes wrong though.

Meh, fair enough.