• 2 Posts
  • 134 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 23rd, 2022

help-circle




  • It’s a crap shoot, but as long as you can verify the supplier (or at least ensure return/refunds) it’s been okay.

    I’ve gotten 2 GPUs and 4 CPUs through eBay, and only one of the GPUs was a scam—still got my money back within the day when it didn’t arrive on schedule (the lister had already deactivated their account)—the RX 6600 is working great so far, and the CPUs have held up in some office workstations and server for a few years now.

    I’ve also gotten tons of used ram and used ssds and hdds. I’ve had a few times in my workplace where a few sticks of OEM ram and HDD failed, but haven’t had that issue with any of the used stuff (work or home).

    I may be really lucky, or I may be the right amount of cautious (or both), so YMMV—definitely check with others for their experience before you decide to take the risk. Just keep in mind that if you go looking for scams and horror stories, it’s gonna seem like that’s all that happens, and the reverse holds if all you look for is success stories.




  • What really is going on in the US right now?

    Fascism

    Is this worse than the first term?

    Yes

    Why’re legal people being kicked out?

    Fascism

    When is it time to really consider leave?

    November 6th, 2024


    So people don’t think I’m just fearmongering, here’s an in-depth explanation: the Republican party learned from their mistakes during Trump’s first term, and not only figured out how to use him, they had a plan for dismantling the government from day one. Unfortunately, their plan was to keep people focused on survival while they took away any public services, leaving only the parts that could be abused to enrich the billionaires.

    As usual, they utilized divide and conquer techniques to keep the working class fighting amongst themselves about irrelevant issues like gender and immigration and the price of everyday goods. Now they have to make good on those promises to keep their supporters from turning on each other, but since they cannot control the price of goods through sheer will alone, they have to focus on purging the scapegoated groups.

    They achieve this by attacking anyone and everyone who is an immigrant or visitor, documented or not. They are not trying to enforce the law, they are abusing the paramilitaristic forces they have control over (ICE) to see how much they can get their will done through sheer force.

    The reason this works is because everyone in ICE “just follows orders” assuming if anything they did was out of line, someone else would stop them/clean up their mess. Our society operates on one big ethic of “that’s Someone Else’s Problem™.” But here’s the thing: you need enforcers willing to enforce the law, the system of checks and balances, at every level. Right now, there is no one arresting Trump for violating court orders, and everyone’s unsure if they even can because the Supreme Court ruled Presidential Immunity (the president can break most laws if he believes it’s “for the good of the country”).

    On top of all that, the bureaucrats who would usually stand in the way of such gross misconduct are being purged. The red tape is being burned to the ground. The peons are keeping their heads down, “just following orders” as aforementioned, and the high ranking officials with weight to throw around are either following their duty of office—resigning if they refuse to follow orders—or being replaced with sycophants. The sum total effect is that there’s no one within the hierarchy who will stand up to abuse of authority.

    As such, the presidency is free to do whatever he wants.

    And he has. The other lesson The Party learned was to just unleash a constant barrage of policy. No matter what doesn’t pass, there’s a flood to hold back, so some is guaranteed to get through—and every bit that does is that much more power centralized in his office… And the dam will break eventually.

    Meanwhile the liberal “opposition” will continue to waffle for three reasons: one, they’re still trying to play by the rules which have long since been discarded by the GOP; that only serves to benefit their opponents who use that against them. Two, they are easily manipulated by rhetoric, thinking they can bring GOP over to their side by engaging in the same rhetoric as the fascists (e.g. “so much for the party of ‘Law and Order’”); what they fail to comprehend is that the rhetoric fascists engage in is meaningless to the fascists, it is just a smokescreen: to a fascist, everything is about power, and words are just empty containers that you use to manipulate people into doing what you want (a form of power). Three, ultimately the Democratic Party is also in the pocket of billionaires, their interests are the same as the fascists: concentrate power into the hands of the wealthy, privatize the government.


    If you can, leave. It doesn’t get better until after the fascists are violently deposed. They will stop at nothing less. Unfortunately, they have all the people who bekieve in doing that kind of thing on their side, so it’s only going to get worse.

    And by worse, I mean that they’re already making plans for camps. They will market them as firstly “work retreats to heal lost souls,” or some similar rhetorical mixture of corpo-jargon and christianity (the 2 major ideologies) to justify rounding up anyome they deem a useless eater. Or maybe it will juat be called “Prison Labor” (which is really just constitutionally allowed slavery) and they will find whatever excuses to criminalize people they don’t like.

    First it will be “illegals,” then it will be the homeless, addicts, the mentally ill, terrorists, or anyone else that is labelled a threat to society. And collateral damage will be acceptable (and encouraged) this whole time; so sometimes legal immigrants will get scooped in, or trans people who are clearly mentally ill by virtue of being trans, or anti fascists because antifa is a terrorist organization (because big brother tells me it is), or people who express leftist ideals publicly, or gun owners who haven’t pledged allegiance to The Party, or PoC with non-european names, or autistic people, or disabled people (because their secretary of Health and Human Services has “proven” that that disability is fake) or anyone else they believe they can “fix” by forcing them into labor.

    And when those people don’t magically get “fixed” by labor, well… they’re just taking up too much space, aren’t they?

    And the public will largely have one of three reactions: 1. “He can’t do that, that’s illegal! Someone (other than me) should really do something about that! I hope they do sooner than later… Anyhoo, better get back to struggling to survive in the worst recession since the Great Depression”; 2. “Well, business as usual, as long as it doesn’t affect me”; 3. “Hahaha FUCK YEAH, FUCK THOSE [bunch of slurs] AND ESPECIALLY THOSE [more slurs].”

    If you can, leave. If you can’t… Well, read up on your rights and practice as many as you can.

    - sent from the concentration camp I’m now fated to because writing all this will probably labelled an act of treason by The Party.



  • Can someone please guide me into installing it the safest way possible?

    1. Get the installation image you want to use. Fedora has a lot of different flavors, I think they call them “spins,” so it’s important to know the difference and choose the right one for you.

    2. Install it on a VM in VirtualBox. Play around with it, figure out what all the installation steps do, don’t be afraid to break the VM.

    3. Play around with the VM in fullscreen just to get a feel for it. Don’t blame the OS for performance issues, that’s probably just the resource limitations of a VM.

    4. Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary to find an OS that is comfortable enough to be your daily driver.

    5. Use a program like Rufus to make a bootable USB out of the installation image.

    6. Run the installer like you practiced. MAKE SURE YOU SELECT THE CORRECT HARDDRIVE, DON’T OVERWRITE YOUR WINDOWS DRIVE. Otherwise, besides MAKING EXTRA SURE ABOUT WHICH HARDDRIVE YOU INSTALL IT TO, use defaults for settings you aren’t sure about.

    I want to install Fedora on a separate drive and keep my windows drive completely intact (Need it for work).

    I cannot stress the above warning enough: formatting the drive is the one step in installation that cannot be undone. If you format your windows drive, you cannot ever recover that data anymore.

    Since it’s work related hardware, I have 2 pieces of advice; you should follow one or the other:

    1. Don’t. Don’t fuck around with work hardware. It should be a separate PC that you literally only ever use to get work done. Whether it’s owned by a company or you’re self-employeed, mixing your hobby/leisure/gaming/tinker/daily driver with your work computer is a baaaaaad idea. You will get something all fuzzed up, you will try to fix it by reinstalling the OS or otherwise doing disk formatting/partitioning, and you will end up corrupting windows.

    2. Okay, so you decided not to heed my warning because you like gaming (or whatever) too much and can’t afford a separate desktop/tower rn. i get it, I did the same once and lived to tell the tale (i do have separate machines now, fwiw). In that case, before you install fedora, simply disconnect the Windows drive. Yank it right out and don’t reinstall it until you’ve got linux up and running just how you like it. Not just after the installation, but after the configuration. Then there’s no chance you accidentally format/corrupt your drive.

    Preferably I would like GRUB to ask which boot option I want to use if my linux drive is set to be my boot drive and to boot straight to windows if its my windows drive set to boot.

    If the installer gives you the option, simply install Grub on the same drive as Linux. When you select the linux drive in your BIOS’ boot options, it will run grub, which will give you options, including booting into windows if you want. When you select the windows drive in your BIOS’ boot options, it will use the windows bootloader (which boots straight into windows, unless you have multiple windows installations).


  • Openwrt is just as easy to use as any commercial solution, the one difference is that it doesn’t come pre-installed on most hardware. Find the right hardware, and installation can literally be as easy as running a single command from the command line.

    If you’re trying to avoid reading documentation and messing around in settings, good luck finding a privacy-respecting commercial solution with secure defaults that’s still simpler than openwrt’s LuCI. And I mean that, good luck. Plwase share if you find something that works for you.



  • I lived in a small city (~30k) in the middle of rural texas growing up, and our main wildlife was deer, squirrels, possums, foxes, armadillos, javalinas, and birds, although we also had the occasional ratsnake or raccoons or skunks.

    We didn’t really have fruit trees, but we did have plenty of pecans and several gardens of all kinds of veggies, a fig tree that never seemed to bloom, and some assorted berrying bushes.

    We never experienced these plagues of infrastructural damage and diseases and hurt pets (4 cats and 2 dogs in total) that you describe. Idk where people get these horror stories from.

    I suppose it can happen, but that’s probably in areas where such a yard is the only safe space for wildlife and people don’t live with nature as a daily part of their lives.

    I s2g cityfolk act like getting brushed up against by a non-domesticated critter will give them an instant prion disorder.



  • The biggest issue I see is that most of the tech is someone’s IP. If it’s not patented, it’s copyrighted or trademarked. Otherwise, it should be a doable PoC with old parts and a barebones firmware. I don’t need my FOSS printer to contend with Xerox, I just need it to poop out a page when I hit print.

    I’d also love to see a FOSS page description language that could dethrone Adobe’s PostScript and HP’s PCL as the standards.





  • Phones abaolutely do listen, but not to audio via the mic. When Apple and Google tell you they respect your privacy, they mean they don’t harvest data directly from a live feed of the mic nor camera; they still scan your files in some cases, and they harvest your browsing history, and read your text messages metadata, and check your youtube watch history, and scan your contacts, and check your location, and harvest hundreds of other litttle tiny data points that don’t seem like much but add up to a big profile of you and your behavior and psyche.

    So your friend was at a pub quiz with a couple dozen other people, and his phone knew where he was and who was nearby. A statistically significant portion of the people there were not privacy conscious and googled “Lord of the Rings runtime” or something similar. All that data got harvested by Google and Apple, and processed, and then the most recent and fitting entry from some master list of customers’ sites’ articles was pushed to all their newsfeeds.

    Humans don’t understand intuitively how much information is being processed through nonverbal means at any given time, and that’s the disconnect large companies exploit when they say misleading things like “noooo, your phone isn’t listening to you.”

    But it’s totally not privacy invasive, because at no point along the line did a human view your data (/s)